There have been two more Philharmonic Concerts since I last posted about the Eastern Music Festival. The third concert of the season (of six, counting the extra) featured Dame Evelyn Glennie performing Joseph Schwantner’s Concerto for Percussion, Piazzolla’s Tangazo, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.

The program was well-performed, particularly Glennie on the Schwantner, which is a loud, exciting, and well constructed piece of music. There were a few technical problems with the amplification of the work during the dress rehearsal (which, according to accounts, did not occur during the performance, and that is what matters,) and I felt that it was perhaps a bit too loud but I was one of a handful of people in an empty auditorium, so it’s probably not fair to comment about the acoustics. I do wonder, however, if Schwantner initially intended for the percussion to be amplified when he wrote the work. If anyone knows the answer, I’d be curious to know.

As I get older, I find myself growing less and less interested in the Romantic tone poem and Scheherezade is no exception. As a college student, I really enjoyed this piece but now find it a bit trite and underwhelming. The well-performed violin solos and beautiful orchestration just doesn’t carry a piece that seems to me to be overly homogenous and repetitive. While his Principles of Orchestration is a treasure, I am increasingly ambivalent about Rimsky-Korsakov in general.

I’ll post my thoughts about the fourth concert tomorrow.