Farewell, Maestro

Gerard Schwartz
Benaroya Hall, Seattle

Yesterday was the last concert in our Symphony series and when we return in September a new French conductor named Lodovic "Lodo" Morlot will be replacing Gerard Schwartz after 26 years on the podium. Schwartz will stick around Seattle as conductor laureate, but plans to spend most of his time composing and launching an educational TV program about music. We've been regular symphony goers for about 20 years and Schwartz's long tenure was not without controversy. But now that he's leaving, I realize I owe most of my classical music experience and education to Maestro Schwartz. (Along with my tireless "instructor" and expert Maestro JT.) But Schwartz gave me an appreciation for hour long Mahler symphonies-- and that's saying something.

So this entire last season was a farewell tribute to Maestro Schwartz and the program occasionally featured new compositions written in honor of his musical legacy. For example, there was something yesterday called Freilach by composer Paul Schoenfield. And in the lobby we saw a display case filled with photographs and artifacts including Schwartz's shofar, which looked something like the polished horn of a giant sheep. John looked it up on Wiki, and the shofar is mentioned frequently in Hebrew literature. It is a type of powerful horn-- the blast of which could made the Israelites "tremble in awe." (Exodus 18, 20) Appropriate, since Maestro Schwartz began his musical career as an exceptional trumpet player. A masculine instrument, if there ever was one.
The piano playing was masculine yesterday. The guest pianist William Wolfram is a tall and powerful man, and he played Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto #2. One of his reviewers wrote he is able to summon "torrents of music," a phrase that brings to mind the most spectacular sound a piano can make: the glissando. It means to "slide, glide, sweep or smear" across the keyboard. The Liszt Concerto has several loud and wonderful glissandos at the end that would wake up anyone who happened to doze off. The glissando notes look something like this: