Grieg's Peer Gynt and Kellogg's Fiery Furnace at the San Diego Symphony (25 April 2008) Apr 26 '08    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line Get a taste of an American oratorio and a Norwegian anti-hero at the San Diego Symphony this weekend. Pre-Heating the Hot Weekend with Kellogg's Fiery Furnace and Grieg's Peer Gynt at the San Diego Symphony (25 April 2005) It had been nearly a year since I last attended a performance of Jahja Ling and the San Diego Symphony at Copeley Hall in Downtown San Diego, and I was missing my instrumental root after all the opera listening I've been doing. So I actually bought a right-center balcony ticket to the symphony on Friday for the world premiere of Daniel Kellogg’s The Fiery Furnace and selections from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt. It was the first show in a run of three performances (April 25, 26, 27)... Considering how all the weather forecasters are calling for a towering heat-wave to hit us this weekend, I think I lucked out for having attended the Friday show (the auditorium isn't air-conditioned). The first half of the concert was actually the world premiere of a Biblical oratorio, The Fiery Furnace, by Daniel Kellogg, the young American composer who also wrote his own libretto. Commissioned by Soli Deo Gloria, Inc, the story was taken from the book of Daniel, where the Jews were enslaved in Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar's defeat of Jerusalem in 605 BC. Being subjected to pressure to worship the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar, the Jewish priests; Shadrach, Mechach, and Abednego refuse to bow to a foreign god. So, Nebuchadnezzar orders the three thrown into a fiery furnace, which is so hot that the Babylonian guards who throws them in is scorched to death, but the God of Judah, being pleased by their faithfulness, protects the Jews from the flame. Amazed out of his wit by this miracle, Nebuchadnezzar has a change of heart and allows them back out of the furnace while commanding all to praise the Jews' God. After the 10 minute intermission, the second half of the program features 12 chronological selections from Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)'s famous incidental music to Ibsen's play, Peer Gynt (Prelude, Act II Prelude, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Dance of the Mountain King's Daughter, Aase's Death, Act IV Prelude (Morning Mood), Arabian Dance, Anitra's Dance, Solvieg's Song, Act V Prelude (Peer's Homecoming), Song of the Church-Goers, and Solvieg's Lullaby).... about the semi-fictional Norwegian bad boy anti-hero who squanders his father's wealth, leaves his mother to a lonely death, gets someone else's wife-to-be pregnant before abandoning her, hoodwinks a family of mountain trolls, cons his way into wealth before losing it to a dancing Arabian girl before returning to Norway with a lot of tales he isn’t afraid of telling. Grieg's music is beloved for its distinct northern Scandinavian sounds. You can almost smell the ice-covered Fjords and the foggy Norwegian woods hearing it. It was quite cool getting to hear a piece of music that has never been performed anywhere before... and by a composer whose works I'm not familiar with at all. Kellogg's The Fiery Furnace comes in 7 sections with a tenor and a bass-baritone soloist singing, respectively, Shadrach and Nebuchadnezzar, and the chorus portraying both the exiled Jews and the Babylonians. The work starts, unexpectedly, with the bass-baritone soloist immediately singing to a disjointed orchestral accompaniment. Kellogg quite aptly paints each 'scene' of the story, with generous use of dissonance when Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians are singing to illustrate the King's detachment from reality and delusional vision of himself. The music becomes tonal and melodic when Shadrach and the Jews are singing... so we know early on whose side to cheer for. It is a rather strange piece of oratorio... A Jewish story related in a distinctly American-sounding music. Much of it, especially in the fiery furnace theme, sounds native-American... as if I was hearing a bunch of Indians gathering around a desert campfire. Taken as a whole, though, this thing is like a set of paintings that you go through from one scene to the next, but the drama is neither sustained nor does it build up to a climatic ending. Being so well regulated by Maestro Jahja Ling's conducting, the orchestral fire neither gave off any heat nor burned anything. I could see each scenes; the unbelieving crowd of Babylonians and their delusional king, the lit furnace, the faithful Jewish priests, and even the image of 'a son of god'(?) walking with the 3 of them in the furnace (thanks to the added trumpets toward the end of the unburning scene)... but I was most definitely not in the scenes nor was I experiencing the story as I heard the music. This applies to both works performed... It was a bit frustrating for me, being a rather drama-oriented audience. I think Maestro Ling is more into playing the music than he is into interpreting it. The orchestra showed some good piano and even pianissimo playing, but somehow all the crescendo started with at least mezzo-forte or louder... and so weren't very effective at all, since the gradient of sound volume was too shallow (you can hardly tell a crescendo from the rest of the music when it starts loud and ends a bit louder). The orchestra was also always too loudly (especially the solo instruments that double the voice) when a soloist was singing. He also tends to mistake speed and loudness for intensity... The famous 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' came out sounding like a Nascar race.... loud and fast without being sneaky or scary. I glimpsed the trolls, but they rushed by so quickly I didn't have enough time to register what they wanted to do with Peer (or if they actually noticed the dude in the first place)... the chorus and the orchestra, following Maestro Ling's furious beats, so simply rushed right by me that I wondered why they were playing that number at all if they were in such a hurry to get it out of the way with! The strings, with some use of rubato, could have been persuaded into singing more provocatively at Peer during Anitra's Dance, and more lonesomely during Aase's Death. It just went on and on like that... Mind you, Maestro Ling isn’t a terrible conductor, I’m just glad that he doesn’t conduct opera.... Listening to his work I wondered if he has ever in his life shouted in anger or cried himself silly after a lost love. Drama-queen he simply isn't! Bass-baritone Stephen Richardson started a bit shakily as Nebuchadnezzar, but grew more and more comfortable as he went (though the lower notes really didn't have enough weight to compete with this orchestra in this setting... I'm not sure it's his fault, as the orchestra really was too loud whenever a vocal soloist was singing all night long). His music is really full of dissonance and seems to spend a lot of time in the uncomfortable passagio, so on the whole I think he did alright. Nicholas Phan, the American tenor, has an easier music to sing and showed off his beautifully well-focused lyric tenor voice during Shadrach's lyrical passages. As Solvieg, the dark-voiced soprano Nicole Cabell had to sit still in front of the orchestra for more than 15 minutes before she got to start singing, and so took a bit to warm up (there was something uncomfortably Christina Deutekom-ish about her sound as she ascends into the top register during Solvieg's Song). Once she did, however, she presented a wonderfully expressive instrument (sounding suspiciously like a mezzo, though), and her rendition of Solvieg's Lullaby was the highlight of the evening. The San Diego Master Chorale did well in both halves of the performance, and everyone got a decent round of applause when it was all over. I must say... by the time I got home half an hour after the performance, the only memorable bits of it I can recall vividly are Maestro Nuvi Mehta (the associate conductor at the SD Symphony)'s witty pre-performance talk, the unseemly rushedness of In the Hall of the Mountain King, and Nicole Cabell's singing of Solvieg's Lullaby. I really wish the segments of Peer Gynt were ...er... integrated into one continuous piece of music rather than as is... They are all rather short and most have such abrupt ending that, even though they were presented in chronological order, it was hard to get (and keep) and image going of the story and adventures of Peer Gynt. It was good to get to hear Daniel Kellogg's new oratorio, too, though I wonder what the piece would really sound like in the hand of a more drama-oriented conductor (and that is really a matter of taste. I'm sure many others enjoyed this super clean conducting style more than I did). This program is being performed at Copeley Symphony Hall in Downtown San Diego (7th and B) through this weekend (Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 2 PM). The show runs for a bit over 2 hours. If you can get there 45 minutes early, be sure to attend the pre-performance talk in the orchestra level by Nuvi Mehta. He's a fascinating character with a special talent for making classical music sounds engaging to hear about. The composer Daniel Kellogg appeared both at the talk and before the performance on Friday. I don't know if he will be doing the same in subsequent shows, though. For more information about the San Diego Symphony, visit their website at www.sandiegosymphony.org/index.php

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