This week we’re getting ready for the upcoming weekend’s classical concerts. Music director Carlos Kalmar is back from another trip around the globe (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle’s old band), and on today’s rehearsal docket was Debussy’s spectacular and sublime impression of wind and water: La Mer.
Not much to say yet, other than that the end of the last movement, which is one of the most satisfying and beautiful brass chorales ever written, was given a thoroughly gorgeous treatment by our brass section. The wind section as a whole sounds just great, with special kudos to Acting principal flute Alicia DiDonato Paulsen, Principal oboe Martin Hebert, and English Horn Kyle Mustain, who all played the crap out of their many solo lines this morning.
Just to get you warmed up for this weekend, here’s a clip from La Mer as played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado.
One reply on “debussy and the sea”
I vividly remember hearing, for the first time, the Oregon Symphony in the spring of 1982 at the old Civic Auditorium. Norman Leyden conducted one of those Sunday afternoon concerts he was so famous for,my date was a young lady I was to marry the next year, and it was the first time I heard La Mer which closed the concert. For those reasons alone, it remains a very special memory.