Season renewal goodies arrived this week. My current subscription is for a Saturday night series, and I've found that it's difficult for me to drag myself downtown at night. I don't drive, and the bus and subway stops near Disney Hall aren't pleasant places to be after dark. So I've missed a lot of the concerts I subscribed to this year, and I considered not renewing at all for next year; it's a lot of money to spend on concerts I don't actually go to.
But I think instead I'm going to switch my subscription to a Sunday afternoon series, which should be less nerve-wracking than Saturday nights.
Choosing a series is always interesting. I like to hear as much new music as possible, so that's where I start looking. There are no world premieres on the season this year, but there are 3 US premieres and one West Coast premiere, and three of those pieces are on the same series. And since the Phil offers a generous exchange policy to its subscribers, it's fairly easy to swap out some of the concerts on a given series for concerts you'd rather hear.
So, assuming that none of the concerts I plan to exchange for are so popular as to sell out during the initial subscription period, this will be my 06-07 Philharmonic season:
October 15: Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Brett Dean, viola
Haydn: Symphony #82 ("The Bear")
Dean: Viola Concerto (US premiere; LA Phil co-commission)
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
November 5: Jonathan Nott, conductor; Joshua Bell, violin
Ligeti: Lontano
Schubert: Symphony #8 ("Unfinished")
Brahms: Violin Concerto
November 26: Carlos Kalmar, conductor; Dennis Trembly, bass
Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen Suite
Harbison: Bass Concerto (West Coast premiere; LA Phil co-commission)
Dvořák: Symphony #7
December 10: Jiři Bĕlohlávek, conductor; Sarah Chang, violin
Bruch: Violin Concerto #1
Janáček: Taras Bulba
Dvořák: Symphony #6
January 14: Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Dawn Upshaw, soprano
Debussy: Nocturnes
Saariaho: La Passion de Simone (US premiere; LA Phil co-commission)
March 11: Leonard Slatkin, conductor; Yundi Li, piano
Liszt: Piano Concerto #1
Holst: The Planets
April 1: Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano
Salonen: Helix (US premiere)
Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet Suite
May 20: Miguel Harth-Bedoya, conductor; Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Simon Preston, organ
Barber: Toccata Festiva
Foss: Time Cycle
Golijov: Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra
Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story
Should be a nice mix. New composers I don't know (with all the press he's gotten, I still haven't heard any of Golijov's music); warhorses I like (The Planets and Pictures -- who can resist those?); composers I ought to know better than I do, like Janáček.
(And what concerts am I swapping out to create this series? An evening of Bach choral music; Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky, with film; and a program of Chopin's 1st Concerto, played by Lang Lang, and Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances.)
Now all I have to do is actually attend the concerts...
3 comments:
Seems to be a oretty interesting line-up, although Essa is sort of falling into the old: lure them in a with a Dvorak Symphony and make them hear contemporary music first...but I don't see any other major US symphonies playing pieces by Saariaho, so good for them.
Good for them, indeed.
Yeah, there's the usual pattern of giving the audience something safe to get them in the hall for the modern stuff. I think of it as the dental appointment philosophy of programming; you make them sit through the root canal of Ligeti before they get the lollipop of Brahms.
And it is, of course, still possible to subscribe without having to hear any of that nasty contemporary music -- there's one eight-concert series that doesn't get any more modern than Britten's Four Sea Interludes -- but the LA Phil does a better job than most. It's a nice place to live.
Other symphonies need to LEARN from the LA Phil...I have never been to a concert there (I'm from Chicago and go to school in Rochester, NY) but they seem to be the only major symphony programming REAL new music...at least I go to a music school where they embrace new music!! Next week I get to play works by Julia Wolfe and Stravinsky (on concerts that include other Bang on a Can composers as well as Louis Andriessen in attendance himself!)
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