The LA Phil has released the first video in its SOUND/STAGE series, drawing on performances that were filmed at the Hollywood Bowl in early August. I attended a couple of the recording sessions and wrote about them in The New Yorker this week. I'm struck again by the bittersweet atmosphere, the tinge of melancholy, which hangs over the lovely musicmaking. That tinge strikes me as an honest and necessary. To spout clichés about "reimagining" concert formats, to issue boilerplate language about resilience and resourcefulness, ignores the elemental struggles that so many musicians are undergoing, not to mention the grief that has invaded so many lives.
The conjunction of Peter Lieberson's "Amor mio, si muero y tú no mueres" ("My love, if I die and you don't") with the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony brings to mind a personal memory. In college, I took a theory class with Lieberson, and one day he detoured from a close reading of Schubert's "Erlkönig" into a rhapsody over the Adagietto. I recall him listening along to Bernstein's DG recording, his eyes closed in bliss, the rigors of harmonic analysis momentarily forgotten.
Previously: Fervor, For Peter Lieberson.
