Last night we went to a excellent concert by members of the Vancouver Symphony. The highlight was a performance of Stockhausen's landmark work from the 1950's, "Kontra-punkte". This was a truly serial piece; pitch, dynamics, timbre etc. all being organized. But the results were refreshing and exciting to hear. Serialism has become the bogeyman of 20th century music, typified as music created by composers indifferent to their audience, and rejected by audiences in return. But how would anyone know it these days, since the music is so rarely played? I salute the courage of Tovey and his players in presenting this piece. Did I mention that the concert, on a Sunday night, was sold out? What we heard was representative of the generation of composers, especially German, that after World War II felt compelled to completely reinvent music from the ground up. That their reinventions did not take hold scarcely matters; what we heard was music of a kind of extreme beauty, chiseled and precise. (Stockhausen would proceed to spend the next few decades trying to reinvent music with every new piece.) The extremely difficult piano part was performed with great skill by the fearless Corey Hamm, and the performance was superb. The rest of the program was equally interesting, including a piece by the great Morton Feldman, and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera Suite, which we heard recently performed by the Turning Point Ensemble. The Orpheum Annex has quite a dry acoustic, enabling every single detail of Weill's fascinating orchestration to come through clearly.
My only problem with the concert was with the spoken introductions. Tovey's introduction to the Weill was mostly incoherent. Riddled with his trademark dry humor, he didn't really tell us much about the music. He brought up the fact of Stockhausen's piece representing one side of the "great divide" in 20th century music, without mentioning what Weill might have to do with the other side, if that is what he meant. He also invoked Liza Minnelli, but without ever mentioning Brecht. Perhaps the talks are just about warming up the audience and making the laugh a bit; in that case, musical information is superfluous.
