Carnegie Hall, on of the most important and famous concert venues in the world, is located right here in Midtown Manhattan. Designed by William Burnet Tuthill, Carnegie Hall was built in 1891 thanks to the financial support of Andrew Carnegie. When first built, it was intended that the building be used to serve as a place for the Oratorio Society of New York and the New York Symphony Society to hold meetings and any events the two groups organized. The building underwent renovations between 1893-1896, though, in which two towers of artist’s studios were added, alterations were made to the buildings smaller auditorium on the lower level, and board members convinced Carnegie to allow them to name the masterpiece of a building after him. Currently, there are three halls; the Isaac Stern/ Ronald O Perelman Stage, seating 2,804, the Joan and Sanford I. Well Recital Hall, having 268 seats, and the Judy and Arthur Zan Onekle Hall, with 599 seats. One of the most interesting things about the building, structurally anyway, is that it is one of the last large buildings in New York City that is build completely out of masonry without a steel frame. This adds to the sort of magic that Carnegie Hall has, for it is such an old building yet it still stands very distinctly in a city full of giant steal sky scrappers. For our visit to the legendary Carnegie Hall, we saw two pieces be performed. The first piece was Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major. Op. 61. Beethoven created this piece in the early 1800s and was first performed on December 23, 1806. Prior to this piece, Beethoven had become proficient with the violin, in both playing and writing pieces for the instrument. This piece being a concerto, a musical work with is usually composed of three parts with one solo instrument, is broken up into three movements. In order, the are entitled “Allegro Ma Non Troppo (D Major),” “Larghetto (G Major),” and “Rondo. Allegro (D Major).” There is also an incredible violin solo throughout the piece that was performed by Midori, a woman who made her violin debut at the age of eleven. The popularity of this piece didn’t start when it first came out, though. It is said that Beethoven was so close to not finishing this piece on time for the performance that on the night of the premier, the soloist and violin player Franz Clement had to sight read the piece while playing it for the first time to a live audience. This performance and the piece itself did not have much success at first. This led Beethoven to revise the piece to fit for a piano solo as well, but this just backfired, leaving pianists unsatisfied, and violinists resentful that he would try to alter such a part. It really gained popularity, though, in 1844 when Joseph Joachim performed the soloist’s part with the Philharmonic Society of London providing the music for the rest of the piece. The next piece that we saw was John Adam’s Harmonielehre, meaning “study of harmony” in German was created in 1985. This piece, like Beethoven’s, is a concerto with three movements, with the first being unnamed, the second called, “The Anfortas Wound,” and the third, “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie.” This piece is often described as a “minimalist concerto.” To be considered in the group of minimalism, a piece must be rooted in it’s fundamental features. More specifically to music, minimalism is when, according to our Carnegie Hall packet, “a piece is contemporary and the composer has reduced the range of compositional materials through the use of repetition and static harmony and the music is marked by extreme simplifications of rhythms, patterns, and harmonies.” This piece, Adams claims, was inspired by a dream that he had. In the dream, Adams was crossing the San Francisco- Oland Kay Bridge in which he saw an oil tanker immerge from the water and shoot up into the hair like the Saturn V. After both the dream and creating Harmonielehr, Adams suffered from a writer’s block that lasted over a year. The title of this piece also draws inspiration from a specific thing. Arnold Schoenberg was a composer who wrote a piece called Harmonielehre in 1911 in which he describes in detail chords, chord progressions, vagrant chords, and creations of tonal areas in terms of harmony. After reading this, Adams was highly impacted by his Schoenberg’s writings, leading to the use of this twelve-tone technique in his piece. These two pieces, although separated by almost two hundred years, work very well when played together. Alan Gilbert, the music director, talks about “extending a dialogue to the past.” By putting a contemporary piece after an old classic, the audience is exposed to two very different sounds, but, with these two pieces, there are elements that tie the two pieces together creating a flow between them. Gilbert also says that by putting Adam’s piece after Beethoven’s, one is able to pick up pieces about the most recent piece that would have been lost had the show had two contemporary pieces.
I copied and pasted this from a word document and I don’t think it made ir one big paragraph. I don’t have it in me to go in a find where to indent. Oh well.
