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Dmurdo

Listed below are comments made by Dmurdo between Friday, 26th September 2008 and Wednesday, 15th April 2009.

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WHAT ARE YOU FOR? 12:52pm on 15 Apr 2009 "Sacking the conductor so that the leader can do a self-drive job won't work with a full size orchestra; but prune us down to a chamber band, give us an inspirational leader like Liz, and it all works fine."

Wasn't that Segerstam symphony you played a while back for full orchestra without conductor? If so, what was it that enabled that to work? (Was the music designed in such a way as to enable different sections of the orchestra to easily take cues from each other, for example?)

Derek
on the bill with Beethoven 9 11:57am on 26 Sep 2008 Thoroughly enjoyed Prom in the Park myself - it is indeed something a bit different to the usual symphony concert and therefore something to be encouraged and developed alongside the aforementioned usual symphony concert, whose extinction would be a travesty were it to occur. Speaking of rolling heads, was it just me or did we lose sound on the horns during the bugle calls? Bit of a blooper there if so.

Last night was excellent - I would never dream of suggesting a performance is all down to the conductor, but hopefully those who were suggesting that Ilan Volkov had lost his spark are eating their words after that concert. The orchestra played with great passion and intensity throughout; the choir in the Beethoven 9 - "a bit small" according to one woman I overheard in the row behind me - packed a healthy wallop in the increasingly famous City Halls acoustic, bringing back memories of nearly being blown out of my seat by NYCoS during the Chichester Psalms a couple of years back; and Neal Davies was the pick of the soloists for me, underlining that with a very accomplished performance in the post-concert recital. Not knowing any Schubert lieder or useful German I hadn't the foggiest idea what he was singing about, but it was a good way to round off the evening nonetheless!

On the question of "no music without key", it seems to me to depend on how rigidly the term "key" is defined - I've heard it suggested that even supposedly atonal twelve-tone music can hint at a key or keys if the tone row is organised in a certain order, for example. Apparently hearing that in Schoenberg inspired Robert Simpson to base some of his earlier music around the dissonance generated by two keys in conflict.

Anyway, great start to the season, and keep up the good work!

Derek

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