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Exciting orchestral Zappa events (+ Harry Partch!) in my hometown this september --

http://ultima.no/#/texts/504

The Ultima Festival has a good reputation for really fine, modern classical music and avant-garde beyond the fringe of audience comprehension, so this is surely a good thing for Zappa's status as well as a treat for the fans

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If I'm not alone... I wonder if I've been asleep?

Cool! Please make sure you record and share it!

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Looking forward to seeing the Ensemble Modern, on Thursday

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If I'm not alone... I wonder if I've been asleep?

I had a great night out yesterday with a good concert and Zappa from DJ Jono El Grande after the show.

Set list at Ensemble Modern's concert (conductor Erik Nielsen), Sentrum Scene, Oslo Ultima Festival 9/5 2013:

Dog/Meat
Outrage at Valdez
The Girl in the Magnesium Dress
Ruth is Sleeping
Get Whitey
G-Spot Tornado

- Intermission -

What Will Rumi Do
Night School
Revised Music For Low Budget Orchestra
The Beltway Bandits
A Pig With Wings
Put A Motor In Yourself
Moggio

Encores:

Peaches En Regalia
The Black Page Drum Solo/The Black Page 1
G-Spot Tornado (again)

The concert was mostly exciting, with some weak spots. The pieces from The Yellow Shark were very similar to the record, focussing more on the rhythmic and emotional aspects of the music than the hardcore modernist stuff. Did it feel a bit dated? Perhaps, just slightly. The synclavier-generated pieces sometimes reveal their origin as something created for a different type of instrument - it seems strange to replicate computer-generated rhythms with an ensemble like this. But the first part was mostly successful, with many beautiful moments and few mistakes. My favourite: Ruth is Sleeping. Others preferred G-Spot Tornado.

The second part was very good until the violin/trombone section of Revised Music For Low Budget Orchestra. At that point the performance became simultaneously excellent and mediocre, with a fabulous violin part by Jagdish Mistry - an excellent player who nailed it completely - while the trombonist unfortunately fumbled, and drowned the violin in the mix. Bruce Fowler was sorely missed, but kudos to Jagdish - what a player!

The musicians' technical problems continued in The Beltway Bandits, which was rather butchered. It seemed underrehearsed and was IMHO pointless in this fashion - the piece should have been left out of the programme when the musician's couldn't handle the technical difficulties. Zappa requires extreme precision to be enjoyable! Thankfully, the last three pieces of the second part were much better.

The ensemble had a few aces up their sleeves for the finale, with two of the encores as absolute highlights of the show. The same musicians who had been stumbling through The Beltway Bandits tackled Peaches beautifully, with all the phrases fully formed and gentle shifts in tempo to accentuate the different intertwining melodic lines. The Black Page was also colossal, before the concert ended with a sensible and exciting repetition of The G-Spot Tornado.

All in all I left with two major impressions - this music needs to be played with extreme dexterity and attention to every little detail to work at all - and - the most lasting treasures of Zappa's work are the pieces from the era when he was continually working with great rock bands, as demontrated yesterday by Peaches En Regalia and The Black Page.

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If I'm not alone... I wonder if I've been asleep?

Thanks for the review, DCB!

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Lies are like quicksand, soft and comfortable, but they will swallow us. Truth is like bedrock, hard and uncomfortable, but we can always stand on it

thanks for taking the time to write that up

Thanks for reviewing the evening, lucky you were there! Hope someone did record it...

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Sounds awesome, thanks for sharing...

The last Zappa event at the 2013 Ultima Festival was Sad Jane performed by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. It was presented along with works by Charles Ives and the premiere of Lene Grenager's VEV (Weaving). The programme was also part of the annual Oslo Cultural Night, and as such a free concert.

This evening - on Friday the 13. - was a more formal affair than Ensemble Modern's show last week at Sentrum Scene. But although the Oslo Concert Hall is normally an art temple for the bourgoisie, the setting of the Cultural Night ensured a rather relaxed atmosphere. There were quite a few young people and even children in the audience.

Lene Grenager's VEV showed a promising composer with good command of the large orchestral resources. She's a cellist herself and isn't afraid to use the dynamic possibilities of the orchestra. The work was an engaging exercise in a post-post-modernist rejuvenated high-modernist writing style.

A number of works by Charles Ives followed - first 10 songs orchestrated by John Adams and Georg Friedrich Haas, sung by Leigh Melrose, then the beautiful and majestic Three Places in New England. Conductor Baldur Brönnimann was convincing throughout, and in the middle section of "Three Places" (Puttnam's Camp) he showed excellent melodic sense, rhythm and expressive body language, which conveyed the explosive vitality of the music perfectly to the orchestra.

The dynamic young conductor's grasp of Ives and Grenager boded well for Sad Jane, the finale of the concert. Brönnimann approached the piece with refined understanding of all the aspects of the score - rhythm, melody, satirical intent and lyricism. I don't think anyone in the audience was disappointed by Zappa's orchestral music. It was rendered with precision and verve and received with warm enthusiasm and loud applause. Heard on the way out: "I liked Zappa best, with the drum set." It was a fine conclusion to a great week for Zappa fans in Oslo.

Later that night --

I went to another free concert, Stian Westerhus with his new band Pale Horses. As good as the orchestral event was, my mind was blown by Westerhus' crazy guitar playing

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If I'm not alone... I wonder if I've been asleep?