Supertitles

The Houston Symphony's home, the Jones Auditorium in downtown Houston, has two screens above the stage, far left and far right, that are normally used to project close-ups of the musicians. I don't mind this, because otherwise it is pretty hard to see the woodwind and brass players from an orchestra seat. There are two cameras, apparently placed in front of the first balcony on each side, so they have a "plunging view" that allows you to see much better what's going on behind the strings.

(Actually, depending who is at the controls, you sometimes get something similar to the quality that filmed concerts may reach: that's when the video person cues a camera on a player who's going to have a particular "moment of fame" in the piece being played, and cuts to that camera at the right moment. Of course, for a concert that's filmed and then edited, it's easy to do this after the fact; but here, we're talking "real-time" camera changes, and that would be impossible if you didn't know the music. I'd like to know who does this work.)

Tonight's concert opened with the Four Seasons, for which Vivaldi wrote some cheesy sonnets that he obligingly transcribed on the score itself so you would have no doubt when the birds are signing (or even which birds they are). Well, the Symphony decided that this was important enough to project these words on the screens during the playing of the four concerti. Please don't do that again: it was distracting, and it left nothing to the imagination any more. Yes, since I first heard the Pastorale, I can recognize when the music imitates a thunderstorm, thank you. And if I hadn't been told that the notes played on the cello at some point represent the barking of the shepherd's dog, I might have missed it, but I don't think that it would have marred my enjoyment of the music. At least not more than the occasional false notes by the solo violinist, who wasn't the one announced on the program and might therefore have had too little time to rehearse properly, who knows?

The second part of the concert consisted of Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony, Italian, and Verdi's Overture to La Forza del Destino. Both excellent in my opinion.

I didn't expect to be disappointed by Vivaldi — but I will always remember a performance I attended in the millennium-old church of Saint Germain des Prés in Paris a few years ago. I was in the third or fourth row, the chairs were hard as usual in those churches, it was cold in there... but it was pure bliss.