Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Last Night in L.A. - Formenti's Homage to Monday Evening Concerts

Last night was a farewell to Monday Evening Concerts as we have known them. It was also the announcement of the first three events of Monday Evening Concerts as they will be. We look back with fondness and some very good memories. We look forward with some trepidation.

Yes, the focus of Monday Evening Concerts of the future should be on the composer and on the music, but I hope the committee planning for the future resolves to do bring back Marino Formenti on a regular basis. Certainly they will do so if they pay attention to the attendance figures; once again, Formenti brought out the largest audience in the past four years. But Formenti is not merely an audience draw, too easily achieved through flashy performance: he offers the most thoughtful and stimulating programs, with outstanding technique, played with the highest level of musicality. He possesses the amazing talent of so understanding the music he plays that he communicates the soul of the work to his audience. When you hear Formenti play a piece you feel you have heard what the work is supposed to sound like; you feel you have heard what the music was trying to say.

Formenti has some ideas on how to re-invigorate the concert-going experience that he wanted to apply. Feeling that most concerts offer a passive, uninvolved feeling among attendees as they travel from work to sleep, he wanted to break a program into smaller units and to provide for social interactions, and refreshment, during longer intermissions. According to his web site, he will try 8-hour events at concerts in Vienna and Berlin. Ours was almost 5 hours, beginning at 7 and ending close to midnight. I would have enjoyed the idea more had this been the end of a week rather than the beginning, but it was interesting to experience. Formenti divided the concert into five components, the third of which was outdoors. Intermissions were designed to bring the audience out of the concert hall into the museum atrium, first for crudite and wine, then for optional supper, finally for complimentary dessert and coffee. The outdoor component of the program followed dinner as part of that intermission; the idea was great, with two works by Cage and one by Nam June Paik, but the location and its acoustics and sightlines didn�t support the idea. Not all ideas work out.

The first and fourth components of the concert contained works performed on Monday Evenings: Ives, Cowell, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartok in the first set; Carter, Stalvey, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nancarrow in the more demanding fourth set which included some spectacular playing. The second component comprised three recent works from Europe: Salvatore Sciarrino�s Notturno No. 1, Vadim Karassikov�s Factor Space for solo piano; Matthias Pintscher�s Monumento 1 � Hommage � Rimbaud. I liked the Sciarrino best. The final component was one work: Morton Feldman�s Palais de Mari (1986), his great summing-up of pianistic contemplation.

The three scheduled concerts for next season, beginning in February 2007, will be in Zipper Hall of the Colburn School, across the street from Disney Hall. This is a much better venue for music than the multi-purpose auditorium at the museum. Salonen, Steven Stucky, and Kent Nagano have agreed to establish the programs for these three concerts. A fourth concert will be a tribute to Dorrance Stalvey, our late leader of the Monday Evening Concerts at LACMA

posted by Jerry Zinser 5/02/2006