Adore? No...2.0

Tonight I went and heard Adorno at Mission San Jose as part of the Music at the Mission concert series. I'd like to start off by saying I think Adorno is a fine group. But the concert itself was not really worth the $20 I paid for it. There were four selections, one by Golijov, Zhoung Long (or something like that), Kurt Erikson, and a female composer from Azjerbaijan whose name I won't attempt here. The concert started at 8, had a 10 minute intermission, and ended a quarter to 10pm. And only had four songs on it. Every song on the concert was unnecessarily long. Maybe I don't have the patience, but it seems of late that most new music concerts I go to have really long songs on it. And lots of them.

The Golijov started quiet and pretty, and essentially sounded like a jewish Arvo Part or something, at least to start with. It was too long, but I like the jewish thing, so it was tolerable.

The next piece was surprisingly not incredibly chinese sounding (as the composer is Chinese) but was also long and did not do well in keeping my interest. Though, I did like the slap tonguing on clarinet, that is a cool sound, much cooler than on saxophone.

After the intermission, was Kurt Erikson's piece. The composer was present...in jeans and a windbreaker, and, to be honest, spoke about as well as me about his piece (though he actually did talk, whereas I don't). The piece was about St. Francis of Assisi and something about internal thoughts and stuggles or something. whatever. the piece was too long and just...I don't know. once it got past the solos and bleeps and bloops parts, the harmonies started getting rather predictable. Annoyingly so, at least for me. But all that could have been forgiven, if the piece had not been twenty minutes long.

The final piece was the Azjerbaijan composer. I had started to get a little worried when I read her bio and there was plenty mention of the second vienesse school and george crumb, also when the pianist was out preparing the piano and a small electrical device was brought out and put next to the first violinist's stuff. It was not quite what I expected. Before reading about the composer, I thought it would end up being lots of folk music inspired stuff, after reading about the composer, I thought it would be a lot of old school non-tonal or aleatoric music. It was somewhere in between. There was definately an eastern european folk music element, but it wasn't so obviously present, and while a violinist was amplified (don't know why, couldn't hear a difference, didn't seem necessary) and the piano was prepared, it wasn't just a crumb rip-off. But after three long pieces, I did not have the patience to sit and listen to another incredibly long piece...and isn't it some kind of rule not to end multimovement works with a slow (like, deathly slow) movement?

So all in all, too long, too long, too long.