Vienna: City of Dreams

Unfortunately, I’ve never been to Vienna. Fortunately, I attended three different concerts in Carnegie Hall’s broad-ranging, month-long “Vienna: City of Dreams” initiative. The first, for me, was at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York on Tuesday, March 11. Seda Röder, piano, Black and White Statements, The Austrian Sound of Piano Today. Ms. Röder played 12 contemporary Viennese piano pieces—some miniatures, some slightly longer. And some included “prepared piano,” where foreign objects are introduced into the strings of the piano itself, which is not my favorite concept. Especially when cotton batting material had to be added (and then removed) between pieces, pencils (chopsticks?) placed on top of strings (to produce a buzzy or tinny sound), and metal (plastic?) rulers (stiff implements?) introduced in order to make scratchy string sounds, etc. Well, I think you get my drift. For me, one of the most humorous was (and I’m paraphrasing here) Three Nihilistic Interludes—Für Elise is mashed up (via MP3) with live playing and comic interaction with machinery by the pianist. See? I have joined the 21st century!

Saturday’s vocal recital was the most tenuous Vienna connection. Nathaniel Olson (baritone) and Kevin Murphy (piano) were to present 13 lieder from Schubert’s Schwanengesang, and some Copland. Instead, we got six Schubert lieder, three Ravel chansons, and Set 1 of Copland’s Old American Songs. Hardly “Vienna: City of Dreams.” In general, I liked Mr. Olson’s lieder and chansons. His lower register seemed, at times, to be overpowered by the piano, and his upper register seemed, at times, to lose focus of the pitch. In the Old American Songs, I found his diction a little less than stellar. He did add his own “take” to some of the Copland songs, but they didn’t quite work for me.

Sunday took me to Brooklyn for the Hugo Wolf Quartet. Okay! A Vienna-based string quartet playing music of Haydn and Schubert. The four-movement Haydn “Joke” quartet (1781) was humorous throughout, but the last movement proved to be the coup de grâce—I really couldn’t tell … when the … movement … would … actually end. Who knows? Maybe like “Drood!” there are alternate endings for different performances? Schubert’s G Major quartet (1826) was a far cry from the Haydn—weightier darker, with movements that were much lengthier and more fully developed. The Scherzo. Allegro vivace—Trio. Allegretto almost got away from the players, but I’m not sure whether that was performance-related or composition-related.

I’m glad I was exposed to “Vienna: City of Dreams.” Maybe I’ll see the real McCoy some day.

ConcertMeister