Tag: performance

REVIEW: Life on Planet Pops

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On December 6, 2023, at the Michigan Theater, the Michigan Pops Orchestra presented “Life on Planet Pops.” I’ve been to every Pops concert since my freshman year, and I was especially excited for this one after seeing this semester’s poster that teased The Lion King, Star Wars (which they somehow manage to play every year), Princess and the Frog, and more. As the theme and poster suggest, all of the music they chose was related to animals, though there surprisingly wasn’t much classical repertoire. However, it was my favorite program out of all of the Pops concerts I’ve seen.

They opened with a medley of Beauty and the Beast and they sounded exactly like the soundtrack of it on Spotify. I loved the concertmaster’s solo so much it gave me goosebumps, and once the melody of Tale as Old as Time played, the strings all together really shined. The song they chose from Princess and the Frog was “Almost There” with a guest student singer from SMTD, and she was very talented. I loved how she opened with dialogue that transitioned into song and that she maintained her character’s cheerful flare throughout the performance.

After a brief intermission, they returned with Hoe Down, a piece with a fun syncopated tune. I’ve heard other orchestras play it before, but I loved that Pops included a good “Yeehaw” in the middle. To end the night, they played the William Tell Overture. I feel like it’s a piece everyone knows. Though I didn’t recognize the title, I immediately recognized the tunes, especially the latter half. 

As always, Pops includes movies to play alongside their music. This semester, they chose to film Pokémon and Jaws, and the way the actors portrayed the animals was hilarious. Pikachu was taller than Ash, his trainer, and the shark in Jaws crawled out of the fountain by the Michigan League. 

I highly recommend going to the Michigan Pops Orchestra concerts. They’re always amazing and enjoyable for people who aren’t well-versed in classical music and I always have a lot of fun at their events!

REVIEW: University Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5

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On Tuesday, December 5th, the University Symphony Orchestra played one of my favorite classical works of all time: Symphony No. 5, op. 47, D Minor (1937) by Dmitri Shostakovich. It’s an eerily beautiful, somber, yet exciting piece. I played this in high school, so it was interesting to be on the other side and listen to the interpretation of another conductor: Kenneth Kiesler.

The orchestra started very slow in the beginning, almost lethargic, which surprised me. It’s usually played quicker to emphasize how striking the opening notes are, but I feel like this version brought out the first violin’s melody much better as it gradually crawls into higher pitches. Once the tempo picked up, however, there was a sense of anxiety and tension in the music that is often present in Shostakovich’s other compositions. The contrast between the pianissimo and fortissimo sections created a similar effect that made everything much more dramatic and catching.

My favorite movement is the third movement, the Largo. It features a lot of wind solos that are all variations of a bittersweet melody, but the different instruments all create new textures. This same theme transfers to the strings that play much more dramatically loud and fast in comparison. The constant flip-flopping between solos and soli (when a section has a solo together) is so good at creating different expressions of anger and sadness. I especially like the harp and harpsichord’s arpeggios at the end of the movement right before the orchestra as a whole comes to a stop.

Afterward, the fourth movement, the Allegro non-Troppo, begins fierce with trills and loud beats of the timpani. This movement seemed much more symphonic to me than the others because of how much more interwoven the parts are and how the notes build off and layer amongst sections. This is especially the case once the key transitions from minor to major chords, which is what composers often do to end on a triumphant note.

I’m always looking for more opportunities to listen to my favorite pieces. I’m so happy I got to hear this symphony live again, and the USO gave an amazing performance of it.

REVIEW: Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra Handel’s Messiah

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Handel’s Messiah is undoubtedly one of the most well-known choral repertoires, and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and UMS Choral Union’s performance of it was very lovely. As Handel’s Messiah is a Christmas tradition, there was a bed of red and white flowers circling the stage that was a nice visual addition. It was packed with a large choir accompanied by a small chamber orchestra, which also had a harpsichord and organ.

I enjoyed listening to the harpsichord because it added a playful quality to the music. The harpsichord is the predecessor to the piano but has a string-like quality, so the sound stood out amongst the rest of the instruments. When the organ played it took me aback because of how loud it was, but I loved the heavier atmosphere it layered onto the orchestra. The strings did a really good job recreating the baroque sound, which is much more airy and uses trills to emphasize notes whereas romantic music uses lots of vibrato.

When Hallelujah played, the audience all stood up to sing along, and the singers around me were very talented, perfectly blending in with the choir on stage. My favorite part, though, was the 48th Air which featured a trumpet solo that traded off with the choir soloist. I don’t think I’ve heard a trumpet solo that was unaccompanied before. The trumpet had a very clear bell-like sound that traveled well through the large hall. I was also a big fan of the ending of the Messiah; it immediately captured my attention with the organ’s entrance and had a wonderful buildup that demanded the audience’s attention.

I’m not religious and wanted to attend this event purely for the music. I do think it’s more targeted towards vocalists than instrumentalists, but it was still fun to see a different side of the strings that had that baroque quality since many baroque pieces played now have adapted a more romantic style. It was a super long concert: almost 3 hours long, so I don’t think I’d attend another playing of Handel’s Messiah. However, I’m really glad I had the opportunity to see it live once.

REVIEW: Imogen Says Nothing

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Imogen Says Nothing by Aditi Kapil is a spinoff story of the character Imogen in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. She’s a character some have interpreted as a typo because she says nothing. However, Kapil turns this character, who serves no purpose in the original, into the main character of a “revisionist comedy in verse and prose” that SMTD describes on their website as a “feminist hijacking of Shakespeare that investigates the voices that have long been absent from the theatrical canon and the consequences of cutting them.” It highlights how women have historically been only seen as an image and deprived of their words. The play not only puts a big emphasis on the power of speech but the power of writing too. 

The premise is a bit confusing: Imogen is a bear disguised as a woman and has been living as a woman for a few years. She travels outside of her small village to the bigger cities and along the way gets dragged onto the stage in the middle of a performance of Much Ado About Nothing. In Elizabethan England, all female characters were played by men because only men were allowed to act. As a result, Imogen has to pretend to be a man playing a woman, and that woman is Imogen herself. In other words, she’s a bear disguised as a woman who pretends to be a man acting out a woman.

It has heavy themes of violence and animal abuse and there are explicit drinking and sex scenes. Furthermore, Imogen is constantly degraded for being female and fat; she even says that her only talent is “whoring”. When she is praised, it’s for her ability to make others laugh but it’s usually because she’s mocked for her background and intelligence. 

Nevertheless, it’s still a comedy and masks the darker content with humor and fun character dynamics. My favorite character was Nicholas Tooley; in the beginning, others always teased him because he was so innocent and pure, but in the end, he was so sassy and dramatic. It was also really funny when there were modern versions of objects on set. For example, for the alcohol they used White Claw, and when checking their contact information they would pull out their cell phones. 

Overall, I highly recommend watching it. It’s a play that’s hard to grasp but fascinating, especially the ending which was the best part. It took a sudden abstract twist that circled back to the underlying message with a single chilling line directed at the audience: “Exit man.” 

REVIEW: Maxim Vengerov with Polina Osetinskaya

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Sunday, November 26th, violinist Maxim Vengerov and pianist Polina Osetinskaya graced Hill Auditorium. It was a full house with a diverse audience, as both of them are world-renowned musicians in high demand. Maxim Vengerov is a Grammy award winner who began his career as a solo violinist when he was just five years old, also the age Polina Osetinskaya began her piano career. With repertoire from four different composers, the music expressed all kinds of emotion, a fitting ambiance for Sunday being the first day of snow and the last day of break.

They opened with Clara Schumann’s Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22, a bittersweet melody that the piano weaved together and the violin brought to life with a strong vibrato on every note. Vengerov and Osetinskaya balanced each other well by taking turns crescendoing or decrescendoing, neither ever overwhelming the other: it was literally the dynamic of a tug-of-war in love.

The next few pieces, in contrast, were striking and sprightful. Whenever there was pizzicato, a technique where the player strums the strings with their fingers, Vengerov would use his whole arm with flare. With every musical line, he played with a full bow that led to a few passionately broken bow hairs. In general, I was enamored by the skill he handles his bow. A lot of the pieces have spiccato, which is a technique where the bow bounces off of the string, and Vengerov transitions seamlessly between the spiccato and legato. The piano creates a similar dialogue by interchanging staccato (a technique of playing notes short but is fundamentally different from spiccato) and legato too.

Since it was only the two playing, the usually cramped stage looked bizarrely empty. People often talk about stage presence when it comes to dancers and singers, but this pair’s stage presence was enough to fill up the whole space. It’s always exciting whenever famous musicians come to town, and this was my second time seeing Vengerov at Hill Auditorium.

This was their concert program:

Clara Schumann
Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22

Johannes Brahms
F-A-E Sonata (Scherzo excerpt)

Robert Schumann
Violin Sonata No. 3 in a minor, WoO27

Sergei Prokofiev
Five Melodies for Violin and Piano, Op. 35bis
Violin Sonata No. 2 in D Major, Op. 94bis

 In addition, they included three encore pieces. 

It was a wonderful show and definitely something I recommend classical music lovers attend!

REVIEW: Complete Solo Violin Sonatas of Eugene Ysaÿe Presented by SMTD Violinists

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To celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for the violin, 13 students studying under Professors Danielle Belen, Aaron Berofsky, David Halen, and Fabiola Kim gave an outstanding performance of the complete set on Monday, November 20th in the Stamps Auditorium on North Campus.

The violin is most commonly seen in an orchestra or accompanied by a pianist. Ysaÿe’s sonatas, however, only showcase the violin. His work highlights the raw beauty and power a talented musician can bring out of such a small instrument. The music made full use of what the violin has to offer through double stops, chords, harmonics, and more, all techniques difficult to master because the slightest tilt of the bow or millimeter difference between the fingers can taint the sound. When Professor Belen and Professor Kim opened the event, they said this was a rare performance only made possible because of the talent that SMTD has.

It was my first time listening to Ysaÿe’s sonatas except for a brief video clip I saw of Maxim Vengerov playing a passage in Sonata No. 3 in D minor, “Ballade,” op.27. It’s a gorgeous movement that has a consistent melodic theme with different variations, but unlike Vengerov’s fierce interpretation, the student soloist Yuchen Cao had a much more gentle and relaxed approach, almost as if he were stroking the strings with his bow.

Sonata No. 2 in A minor, op. 27 had a few elements that pleasantly surprised me. In the II movement, Malinconia, the soloist uses a mute, a tool that string players put on the bridge of their instrument to create a fuzzier sound. Similarly, the III movement, Danse des Ombres, began with pizzicato, a technique where the player strums the strings with their fingers. Both were fun and interesting additions that contrasted the heavier or brighter music that violinists tend to emphasize in solo works.

The last act performed by Tianyu Lin simply blew me away. His technique, the vibrato, the intonation, and the tone, were perfect, making his double stops and chords beautifully ring and synchronize. The precision he had when scaling the fingerboard from its lowest to the highest range was flawless. I honestly feel like I was more enamored by his skill and talent than the music.

Symphonies and concertos are all lovely, but it was a nice change of pace to listen to a collection of Sonatas live. I’ve always been aware that the music department at UofM is top-tier, but this event let the individuals who make up the department shine.