Criticultura em Portugal

As I sat down for Sunday's excellent concert by the French ensemble Quatour B éla , I got nervous. T he audience of 500 or so contained lots of families, including kids under 12. Did they know what they were getting into? Two quartets by Geörgi Ligeti (1923-2006), plus another by his quirky US contemporary Conlon Nancarrow (1923-1997). My experience in the USA with kids attending “difficult” concerts has generally been poor, and I worried about squirming and chatter disrupting what I know would be some very soft dynamics. Not to worry! Behind me, a 12-year-old was chatting with his father, bilingually dropping the names Chomsky, Mahler, and Bartok. The audience was eerily quiet and raptly attentive throughout the 1 hour concert. Apparently, I had wandered into a big Lisbon intellectual family outing! We all saw a great concert by a quartet that has been together 17 years, specializing in contemporary music. They often collaborate with folk, pop, and ethnic musicians, rather like th...

The Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra opened its season Sunday night with a high-quality performance featuring the little-played First Symphony (C minor, op. 11) of Mendelssohn (1809-1849), written when he was 15 years old. This was written just after he had written the 13 string symphonies, and one year before the masterful Octet for strings. This teenager had obviously been honing his craft amidst intense study of past composers, esp. Bach. The symphony is written for strings plus paired woodwinds, trumpets, and horns. The amazing thing about this early work is how complete and polished each of the four  movements are. Most romantic symphonies have at least one dull or filler movement. Not here. The finale may go on just a bit long, but Mendelssohn just had to insert two (not one) iterations of a fugue, reflecting the influence of Bach on the young composer. Conductor Pedro Neves, conducting without a baton,  drew forth a crisp, well articulated performance from the orchestra, ...

This season's first concert of Lisbon's Gulbenkian Orchestra was an odd but interesting choice for a season opener. It featured two "difficult" works, Mahler's Symphony No. 7 (1905) and Geörgy Ligeti's Lux Aeterna for 16 part a cappella choir (1966), I liked the pairing. The opening Ligeti piece (familiar to many from its futuristic use in 2001 A Space Odyssey ) is short, quiet, and atmospheric, made of many overlapping dissonances. It's very hard to sing (I performed it 15 years ago in the US), as you often have to come in solo on a long, exposed, high note, exactly matching the pitch of another singer who came in on the same note a bit earlier. So any hesitancy or inaccuracy is obvious. The Gulbenkian choir performed it well, with only a few soprano and tenor high A's entering shakily. The piece was performed in front of a black curtain behind the orchestra, with the invisible orchestra in the dark. This staging effectively set a nocturnal, spooky m...

The final faculty concert of the summer workshop  Ver ão Clássico was performed on 29 July in the resplendent Coach Museum in Belém. As in the last concert I saw there, the performance standards were very high, with spirited performances of varied pieces, some quite unfamiliar to me.  The opening Beethoven Piano Trio in E flat , Opus 1/1 was composed in 1795 when the composer was in his early 20's, and is among his earliest published works. During this period he was mostly known as a piano virtuoso, but was already studying composition with Haydn and Salieri. He was also avidly studying the works of Mozart, who had recently died. The piano trio reflects his studies, and sounds quite Mozartian, with charming melodies and a lighter more purely classical texture than Beethoven would develop in the coming years. There is not much of the later Beethoven to be heard, but the piano part is quite virtuosic, and was superbly played here by the Ukrainian pianist Milana Chernyavska....

As part of the summer workshop for young musicians Ver ão Clássico, members of the international professional faculty present four concerts, this year all of them in the acoustically and visually beautiful Coach Museum Hall. The initial concert on July 18 apparently had to be reconfigured at the last moment because of the illness of the featured soprano soloist. Inserted instead were the early Mahler Piano Quartet and a Richard Strauss song for soprano Ana-Camelia Stefanescu. The benefit of this reconfiguration was ending the concert with the magnificent Schumann Piano Quintet , one of the best chamber pieces in the literature. Overall, the concert was beautifully performed and invigorating. The Mahler Piano Quartet is a rarity, composed when he was only 15-16 and still finding his way. There are bits of Brahms and Liszt audible, and a couple passages reminiscent of the later symphonies, but mostly some nice undifferentiated romantic music by an avid student studying the masters for i...