A Night of Chamber Music

PCMS Winter Festival
March 22, 2014 Jeremiah Craig 0 Comments

Last night I attended a Chamber music performance with my friends from the band, The Heaviest Cat. It was put on as apart of the Phoenix Chamber Music Society’s Winter Festival and it was the final night of a week long performance series at various venues across the valley. The music for the entire night was spectacular but there were a few things about the show that disappointed me.

The first piece of the night was Camille Saint-SaensLe carnaval des animaux. This was not published until after Saint-Saens’ death because he had originally written it for his own pleasure and to entertain friends. Each movement of the piece represents a different animal and it was fun to imagine the image that Saint-Saens must have had in his mind of the animal just by listening to the music.

The movements didn’t need explaining since there was a program that listed each movement but the performance featured two actors who read silly poems about the animal before each movement. I found this to be a little corny and limited the audience’s imagination. It also felt like an interruption to the music. Like it was forced or like they were trying too hard to make the performance interesting to everyone. Still the music was beautiful and my favorite movements from Le carnaval des animaux were Aquarium, with its wonderful sweeping piano and xylophone parts, and Le cygne (The Swan) with its incredible cello solo. Take a listen to the entire work here.

Chamber Music Stage
The stage set up for Le carnaval des animaux

After the intermission, the musicians came back on stage to perform Igor Stravinsky‘s L’Histoire Du Soldat which is a parlor performance work about a soldier who makes a bad deal with the devil. The piece is meant to be accompanied by dancers and characters to tell the story and play the parts of the narrator, devil, soldier and princess.

I had the same disappointment from the first performance in the actors who were narrating and playing the parts for the Stravinsky piece. Unfortunately, they had not memorized their lines so all three actors were reading from binders while also trying to act. Also, the actor playing the soldier was clumsy, continuing to drop props throughout the entire performance. In addition to that, there were no dancers and it became obvious that the work needed the dancers as there were many moments when the actors were awkwardly standing around or pacing back and forth waiting for the orchestra to finish the music so they could continue their lines. It was a distraction and it took away from the music. It’s a shame too because Stravinsky wrote great parts for the bassoon and violin in particular and the music was so interesting.

I guess I expected more from the Phoenix Chamber Music Society. Especially since tickets were $50 each. Mine weren’t nearly that expensive but if I had paid $50 to see such a lackluster performance I would’ve been much more disappointed. I felt like the show would have been so much better had there not been the actors. If they choose to do similar pieces next year with narration and/or actors, hopefully they’ll be much more polished in their parts because they were a distraction from the music.

Listen to L’Histoire Du Soldat in its entirety here.