LA Phil: The Planets

Tonight at the LA Phil I totally lucked into some fantastic seats in Walt Disney Concert Hall: row EE - only 5 rows from the stage! The sound is so warm, deep and wonderful there and you can really hear all the colors of the orchestra. Sitting there, you really, truly understand what all the incredible fuss is over Walt Disney Concert Hall. The sound is radiant (not that it isn't in other parts of the hall); plus the seats are comfy and there's more legroom. Located smack-dab in the middle of the concert hall, it's like you're being luxuriously bathed in the sound coming from the stage. So tonight I luxuriated gratefully thanks to a generous subscriber with an unused ticket. And I look forward to the day when I can afford my own tickets down there.

The concert was fabulous as well. Leonard Slatkin, music director of the New York Philharmonic, conducted the LA Phil in tonight's concert. First was a contemporary piece by Stephen Reich called Triple Quartet (more info & sound clips). The program notes seemed to indicate that the piece is normally be performed by three quartets, each quartet with different variations of string instruments grouped into four. Tonight, there was a much bigger ensemble playing - a full string orchestra. The piece was kind of hypnotic - soundscapes played out over a pulsing rhythm that developed in crescendo of musical ideas. Then they faded away and the rhythm changed for the next movement. There were three of these. With the pulsing rhythm beneath it reminded me of Philip Glass and a piece I heard of his, a string quartet. This one was different from the Glass of couse, but I felt the same hypnotic pulse. it was an enjoyable 15 minutes.

Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 (more info & sound clips) was next, a big, bombastic concerto with loud thundering piano secions alternating with swooning, soft lyrical ones. Yundi Li was the piano soloist. He was remarkably expressive and dramatic, both musically and physically. Sitting so close, I kept watching his hair flop around when he got excited. The position of the piano was just about level to my head, and the lid was open straight to my face - all of which gave a new perspective on the piano in a big orchestra for me. In a standard hall, the piano is never quite level to the audience in such an intimate way: the first level of seating is considerably below the stage on the main floor, and the mezzanine is farther away. Here, I was only a few feet from the piano so the sound came at me directly. It was loud, crisp, clear and a little startling. Mr. Piano certainly took the lead here, and the sound had even more clarity than on a recording of a piano concerto (great fun!). The orchestra wasn't out of balance though; see above for my thoughts on being bathed in the orchestral sound.

The evening finished off with Gustav Holst's The Planets (more info & sound clips), a piece for ginormous (hehe) orchestra that included use of the organ and a chorus of women's voices. The piece is coloful and fun to listen to. Each of the movements takes on the character of the planets, playing off both their image in the night sky and the gods of Roman mythology that they are named after: so Mars is warlike and fierce, Mercury is fleeting and quick, Jupiter is huge sounding. The Jupiter section has the most famous music (embarassingly, I know it from the Walt Disney World soundtrack for the Illuminations fireworks show at Epcot), and the audience loved it; some tried to clap, but it was smack dab in the middle of the piece so they didn't get very far. I loved the way they positioned the women's chorus tonight - it was off stage, hidden in a listening room up on the Terrace level of the theatre. That listening room is just next to the seating terrace, and from there you can't see the stage but it has no ceiling so it's open to the auditorium from above and you can hear everything. And so with the chorus hidden in there, their sound rose out of the room and drifted over the hall: it was the perfect heavenly sound for the Neptune section of the piece, which Holst subtitled 'The Mystic.' Perfect.