sounds of america

Alsop: starting with a bang in Cleveland

Josefowicz: championing the contemporary

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SEATTLE Seattle Symphony Orchestra The Hard Nut (December 1-4) Classic seasonal fun with The Nutcracker. Not quite. In Mark Morris’s hands some of the warm glow of yesteryear turns to neon with a very different retro take on The Nutcracker. Morris updated the Balanchine classic by banishing the Sugar Plum Fairy, and mixing up sincerity with satire in The Hard Nut. Heresy, some may say. And yet, Morris’s piece has just celebrated its 20th birthday, so irreverence also has a place at the table. This audacious production, presented by the Seattle Symphony in collaboration with the Seattle Theatre Group, may be raucous and camp but it’s typically a big hit with audiences. The show features the stark, black-and-white art of American cartoonist Charles Burns, an avant-garde counterpoint to Tchaikovsky’s beloved score. seattlesymphony.org

SAN FRANCISCO San Francisco Symphony Salonen Violin Concerto with Leila Josefowicz (December 8-10) The violinist Leila Josefowicz, a former child prodigy, has made it her musical mission to bring new works for the violin to the concert hall. An ardent champion of contemporary composition, she joined forces with the composer (and former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) Esa-Pekka Salonen who wrote this violin concerto specially for her. They premiered the piece with the Los

VI GRAMOPHONE NOVEMBER 2011

Angeles Philharmonic in 2009 where it was a hit with both critics and crowds. Since then they have essentially been touring the US with the piece. Here is San Francisco’s chance to hear the piece once described as ‘pure, euphonic poetry’. Josefowicz, known for the intensity of her renditions, calls the piece her own personal violin adventure. It makes sense that the Helsinki-born Salonen opens the concert with Pohjola’s Daughter, a musically opulent symphonic fantasy written in 1906 by his countryman Sibelius. The program closes with excerpts from Wagner’s Ring cycle. sfsymphony.org

CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA Severance Hall Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony (December 8-10) Marin Alsop makes her debut with the Cleveland Orchestra in December with an ambitious roster of works that starts allAmerican and ends with a blast of French romantic grandeur – in other words Camille Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No 3 ‘avec orgue’. It’s more popularly known as the Organ Symphony, which is not entirely accurate as the composer uses the instrument in only two of its four movements. Still, when the organ does enter, the audience certainly knows it. It’s also an opportunity for the multi-talented principal keyboard, Joela Jones, to shine on a symphonic scale when she delivers those chords in Severance Hall. The composer played the finished work to a frail Franz Liszt who had only months to live; and so the symphony’s dedication reads: ‘To the memory of Franz Liszt.’ This grandiose programme starts with an early work by Samuel Barber and also features Leonard Bernstein’s five-movement ‘violin concerto’, Serenade, played by Cleveland concertmaster, Peter Otto. clevelandorchestra.com

LOS ANGELES Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Ravel, Adès, Tchaikovsky, Respighi (December 10-11) Jeffrey Kahane leads one of America’s best chamber orchestras in a programme that, on the face of it, looks eclectic. But dig a little and you find coherence – the four works address 17th- and 18th-century musical sensibilities. Up first is Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. Written between 1914 and 1917 it is also dedicated of his friends who died in the First World War. Contemporary British composer Thomas Adès is also fascinated by Couperin and has adapted three of his keyboard works for string ensembles, adding woodwinds and percussion to create Three Studies from Couperin. The internationally acclaimed cellist Ralph Kirschbaum joins the orchestra in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme for Cello and Orchestra – the closest the composer ever came to writing a cello concerto. And Respighi’s Gli Uccelli is based on Baroque pieces imitating birds. laco.org

Previews by Damian Fowler gramophone.co.uk