Album Review: Lise Davidsen and Leif Ove Andsnes- Edvard Grieg

I often wonder if the ongoing pandemic is making my world bigger or smaller.  The new album by the magnificent soprano Lise Davidsen compels me to reexamine the question.  While I haven’t touched my passport during the past 24 months, I’ve become increasingly dedicated to reading literature, studying history and furthering my musical literacy.  

Scouting potential day trips from Kansas City about a year ago, I considered driving to the site of Willa Cather’s family homestead in Nebraska.  I reckoned I should first familiarize myself with her work.  What began as a casual investigation quickly became an obsession.  I’ve since read almost everything she published.

Opera, another of my nascent infatuations, figures heavily in Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark. Although she rose to fame after the novel’s publication and was of Norwegian rather than Swedish descent, the opera star Kristen Flagstad served as my proxy for Cather’s protagonist Thea Kronberg. A few of Flagstad’s vintage recordings of Grieg are astonishingly vibrant.

So while I’m still little more than an enthusiastic greenhorn, "Møte" and "En Svane" are among the repertoire on Davidsen and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes’ exquisite Edvard Grieg that were previously familiar to me. I’m having an unreasonably good time comparing Flagstad’s approach to Grieg to Davidsen’s. My soundtrack for the Red Cloud road trip is set.

Concert Review: Joshua Bell and Alessio Bax at Helzberg Hall

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

The reacclimation process will be more difficult than anticipated.  Less than two weeks after I posted an essay about how the sonic flaws common to classical recordings make the music more approachable, related forms of distraction irritated me at the first ticketed classical concert I attended in 2021.

A variety of sonic and visual static diminished a distressingly brief and acutely hushed recital by Joshua Bell and Alessio Bax at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday, October 2. The concert opened the 2021-22 season of the Harriman-Jewell Series Series.

Much of the audience of about 500 was obligated to contend with the desperate flailing of a large man in the second row of Helzberg Hall during the 65-minute performance.  Clearly experiencing extreme physical discomfort, he frantically fanned himself with a program.  I was genuinely concerned for his welfare.

A phone alarm sounded between the first and second movements of Maurice Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2.  An ill-timed cough marred an interpretation of a Giacomo Puccini aria.  And a man near me was compelled to accompany the musicians by eliciting a remarkable range of creaks from his wobbly seat.

My noisy neighbor may have been inspired by Bell.  Edvard Grieg’s Violin Sonata No. 3, the dramatic opening piece, allowed the star to explore multiple facets of the violin.  While I felt no affinity for the composition, Bell’s ballyhooed technical faculties were astonishing.

A rendition of Ernest Bloch’s earthy “Nigun” was more interesting, but the twists and turns of the Ravel sonata were a revelation.  Having never heard the jazz-tinged piece, the dissonance- punctuated by Bell’s occasional gasps- shocked me.  It was precisely the kind of noise I’m eager to embrace.