I suppose there is a first time for everything. The first time to encounter a composer. The first time to listen to a composer's major work. And the first time to walk out of a concert. This performance saw all of these.
Somehow I got to learn that there is a concert of Mikis Theodorakis' Canto General. I haven't heard of Theodorakis before, not to mention my lack of familiarity with his body of work. So, in the interest of sampling new sound, I went to Stuttgart one day in order to attend this concert. Beforehand, I read about him in Wikipedia, and learned that he is supposedly Greece's most famous composer, and he is also a political activist. He would have turned 100 this year, hence his music was being played. And since I knew nothing about him, I wanted to fix this gap.
Canto General is an oratorio, set to poems by Pablo Neruda. I am also not familiar with Pablo Neruda's work, even though I am aware he is a poet from Chile. Apparently, Theodorakis and Neruda were close.
The orchestration was rather interesting. The orchestra did not feature any traditional string instruments, but rather had quite a few guitars, electric guitars, even a traditional instrument like the bouzouki was also on stage. And there was plenty of percussion: there were five sets of percussive instruments on stage. There was a choir, and there were two soloists, a mezzo-soprano and a baritone. This looked interesting.
However, the music unfortunately was not interesting, at least for me. It wasn't engaging me, and I was falling asleep. There was extensive use of maracas, which somehow annoyed me. And perhaps I was expecting some attention-catching contemporary classical music, but what ended up being played on stage seemed like just an evangelical choir one would typically find in churches in the American South.
Somehow it seemed the audience liked it, as they were clapping after every movement (there were 13 movements in all). But unfortunately, I was not impressed. So during the intermission, I decided to leave. It was the first time I have done such a move.
So yes, I am glad to have tried it, and even though I had to go all the way from Berlin to Stuttgart to do so, I still am glad that now I know what Mikis Theodorakis' music sounds like. It's probably unlikely that I would seek out his music again, but who knows. In any case, I have plenty of other composers whose music I find engaging.
