The Blog

Review

Rob Hubbard, Special to the Pioneer Presstwincities.com
February 16,, 2012

Ah, Paris in February. Granted, spring is the prime season for visiting the city by the Seine, but soprano Dawn Upshaw and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra are offering a musical journey there this weekend. With the help of French conductor Ludovic Morlot, the SPCO is presenting sets of songs by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, bookending them with Ravel’s ballet music for “Mother Goose” and Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony. Clever continuity, n’est-ce pas?

Building programs with visible threads is something at which the orchestra has really improved in recent seasons, and Thursday night’s concert at the Ordway was an excellent example. And a meeting of Upshaw’s expressive and powerful voice with the evocative impressionism of Debussy and Ravel proved something well worth experiencing.

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News

Steven Winn on American Orchestra Forum
February 1, 2012

Ludovic Morlot, the ebullient new 38-year-old music director of the Seattle Symphony, is making waves in his city, creating fresh pathways of connection between the orchestra and its community. According to a recent admiring piece in the New York Times, Morlot hopes to make the Symphony “central to Seattle’s cultural scene, open-minded and with a taste for collaboration and experimentation.” Plans for the 2012-13 season include a series of 10 p.m. Friday new-music concerts (open-endedly dubbed [untitled]) in the lobby of the orchestra’s Benaroya Hall home, with drinking and mingling encouraged; the premiere of John Luther Adams’ ambitious “Become Ocean,” an especially apt fit for this water-oriented place; and a collaboration with the Intiman Theater, one of the leading lights of a theater-rich town. The season announcement came at City Hall, after a free concert attended by Mayor Mike McGinn and lots of children.

In another news story, Morlot expressed his enthusiasm for the orchestra’s Symphony Untuxed concerts. As he told the Seattle Times, “We want to be very casual and invite everyone to come as they are.” That may be especially important in this city, where Northface jackets and REI hiking boots are for many a standard dress code. Morlot is taking care to take a full measure of his new city. He threw out the first pitch at a Seattle Mariners baseball game.

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Review

Bernard Jacobson, Seen and Heard International
February 1, 2012

Commissioned by the Seattle Symphony jointly with the Kitchener-Waterloo and Winnipeg symphony orchestras, Nico Muhly’s So Far So Good gave the audience at these Seattle subscription concerts much to enjoy. Muhly, born in Vermont thirty years ago and now living in New York, is a craftsmanlike composer with an acute ear for orchestral sonorities. But, more than that, his new roughly 15-minute piece manages to be simple without being simplistic.

The opening measures are immediately engaging, stertorous interjections in the lower brass interacting with a prevailing curtain of delicate harmonies. This proves to be suggestive of the path the entire piece is to follow: there is something reminiscent of Bachian chorale prelude technique, even of the still older language of the Renaissance cantus firmus, in Muhly’s superimposition of long-breathed melodic lines – many of them, beautifully played on this occasion, for solo woodwinds and brass – against a texture of rapid figurations in a variety of other instruments.

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Review

by Dana Wen,The Sun Break
January 28, 2012

Ludovic Morlot’s been hard at work. Although it’s only been a few months into his first season as music director of the Seattle Symphony, Morlot has already made waves with his adventurous programming and fresh approach to the symphonic repertoire. Thursday night’s concert was no exception, sandwiching Schubert’s beloved “Unfinished” Symphony No. 8 between a world premiere by Nico Muhly and a performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 by Marc-André Hamelin. The Symphony will perform the same program again tonight.

In many ways, these works are worlds apart. However, when they’re performed together as part of a unified program, listeners are invited to draw parallels between the pieces. In this way, a program that initially seems like a musical grab-bag is be transformed into an insightful exploration of a single musical concept. At Thursday’s concert, the theme of the night seemed to be musical texture. All three pieces on the program cycle through a wide variety of orchestral textures in a short amount of time, creating a musical landscape full of changing moods and colors.

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Review

By Gavin Borchert, The Seattle Weekly
January 25 2012

If in his first concerts with the Seattle Symphony last fall, music director Ludovic Morlot staked his claim with unconventional programming and an enthusiasm for the modern, his return last week, after a few months away, focused on a couple of works from the very center of the standard repertory. He still had plenty of surprises to spring, however.

With half the orchestra on Attila duty at McCaw Hall, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was played with a smaller-than-usual contingent at a free concert last Wednesday in City Hall’s airy atrium. I’m convinced Beethoven sounds best this way: When the wind/string balance is tilted in favor of the winds, the overall sound is beefier and more colorful. In the first movement, for example, the composer at one point sets flute and oboe alone in treacherous dialogue with the entire body of strings; the moment really popped out, bright and balanced, with 27 string players rather than the usual 50-plus. Epitomizing the performance’s tightness and vigor were this movement’s two closing chords, with the impact of a fist. Morlot has the Seventh scheduled again for April 2013; I hope he again uses a slimmed-down orchestra.

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Critic’s Notebook

by Zachary Woolfe, New York Times
January 27, 2012

SEATTLE — At a cocktail party on Wednesday evening in an art-filled home in the fashionable Capitol Hill neighborhood here, Andrew Russell, the 28-year-old artistic director of the Intiman Theater, addressed a small crowd in front of a picture window and unexpectedly mentioned Ludovic Morlot. Assuming that the Intiman could stabilize its shaky finances, Mr. Russell said, he had confirmed a 2013 collaboration with Mr. Morlot, the new music director of the Seattle Symphony, on a production blending text and sound that would investigate music’s effects on the mind and body.

Earlier that day Mr. Morlot, 38, had stood in a light-filled room at City Hall, his hair still matted with sweat after a vigorous performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in the lobby atrium, and announced his orchestra’s adventurous plans for 2012-13.

It is just halfway through Mr. Morlot’s first season here, and just a few years after this French-born former violinist rose swiftly to prominence in last-minute appearances with the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But his presence from downtown to Capitol Hill, from the seat of city government to young theatrical circles, is already a sign of the leader he would like to be and the orchestra he envisions: central to Seattle’s cultural scene, open-minded and with a taste for collaboration and experimentation.

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News

Jen Graves posted on lineout.thestranger.com
January 26, 2012

The season lineup is huge—dozens upon dozens of concerts and events. But the highlights are:

1. A new series called [untitled], of late-night contemporary music in the lobby at Benaroya Hall. There are three of these concerts; they start at 10 pm on Fridays. The first, in October, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the World’s Fair in Seattle with pieces composed in 1962, including Ligeti’s Poeme symphonique for 100 metronomes (!). This same program also celebrates the 100th birthday of John Cage with his Variations III. In February, Schoenberg gets the spotlight, with his Pierrot Lunaire plus chamber works by Jörg Widmann and Daniel Schnyder. And the final concert of the series features three world premieres by Seattle Symphony principals Ben Hausmann, Jordan Anderson, and Seth Krimsky, along with works by Anna Clyne and Chinary Ung.

2. The premiere of a John Luther Adams work called Beyond Ocean, which Seattle Symphony will then premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2014.

3. A repeat of Sonic Evolutions, the evening of classical music inspired by local non-classical musicians. This year, the non-classicals were Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Nirvana. Next year, they’re Alice in Chains, Blue Scholars, and Yes (no, Yes is not local, but it does have a local connection). And symphony players will be joined by Star Anna and the Laughing Dogs.

News

By Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times arts writer
January 25, 2012

Seattle Symphony’s next season will feature first-time Symphony performances of Britten and Messiaen works, a world premiere of a John Luther Adams piece, guest appearances by Joshua Bell and Garrick Ohlsson, and a new late-night experimental-music series.

Just weeks before he took the helm as the Seattle Symphony’s music director last September, conductor Ludovic Morlot already had a notion of what he’d be doing in his 2012-13 season. “I ultimately want to go back and work on the classics,” he said. “I’ll do a lot of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms with the orchestra, so that we start really working on the sound as well.”

Well, Mozart, Beethoven and the gang are all well represented in the newly announced season. But there are less expected items on the roster, too. Olivier Messiaen’s monumental Turangalila Symphony (with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist) and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem will both get their first Seattle Symphony performances. Britten’s magnificent Cello Symphony — originally composed for Mstislav Rostropovich — is coming to Benaroya, too.

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News

Posted by: Allison Williams on Seattle Met
Jan 25, 2012

The Seattle Symphony makes its announcements in style; conductor Ludovic Morlot lugged his whole group down to City Hall for a free concert this afternoon before releasing the 2012–2013 lineup. Fine, Ludo—we’re listening.

Morlot’s second season invites back some of the same big names that paid us a visit in his first; Joshua Bell, Itzhak Perlman, Emanuel Ax, and Hilary Hahn all return. But there’s new stuff, too, like revamped Rush Hour concerts—they’re now called Symphony Untuxed, and they’re followed by cocktail mingling with the musicians. Plus, there’s a new concertmaster, Alexander Velinzon, straight from the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

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Review

by Isabel Herzfeld, Der Tagesspiegel
January 20, 2012

Kann es von Beethovens Violinkonzert noch eine neue, überraschende Lesart geben? Ungezählte Aufführungen und Aufnahmen haben das Werk in die Ohren geradezu eingebrannt. Das Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin nahm es seit 1945 immerhin 14 Mal ins Programm; Frank Peter Zimmermann spielt jetzt in der Philharmonie die 15. Aufführung, seine dritte mit dem RSB. Doch mit Ludovic Morlot am Dirigentenpult ereignet sich ein kleines Wunder. Der 37-jährige Franzose prägt den ganzen Abend durch Finesse und Eleganz, was Wärme und Tiefe des Klangs nicht ausschließt. Schön, dass sich so im fließenden Tempo niemals Pathos und Gefühligkeit festsetzen kann – Beethoven leicht und sehr modern.

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