Last Sunday we treated ourselves to a multimedia performance at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall with Frans Lanting’s LIFE: A Journey Through Time. Frans Lanting is a Dutch-born nature photographer specializing in wildlife photography whose award-winning, respected work has been frequently published in the National Geographic, GEO or the German Stern magazines. A Journey Through Time was an animated slideshow of nature photographs on a three-screen display above the orchestra, presented with a score composed by Baltimore native Philip Glass. This was a debut of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the occasion of Philip Glass’ 70th birthday.
I’m sure you are probably familiar with Philip Glass already, but if you aren’t: He is one of the most influential American minimalist or neo-classical composers who has written a countless number of ensemble works, operas, symphonies, concertos, film scores or piano pieces throughout the last few decades. Among so many other works he created the score to Godfrey Reggio’s Quatsi-trilogy, collaborated with Aphex Twin and David Bowie, and he also composed the score to the Journey Through Time last Sunday.
The event opened with a performance by the Capitol Quartet and orchestra performing Philip Glass’ Concerto for Saxophone Quartet. It was superb, but due to a brief snowfall and much to our disappointment it was decided to cut this pre-concert short and continue without intermission to the main presentation.
I noticed that many many seats were left empty again. The attendance wasn’t as bad as Michael Brook’s concert I wrote about in one of my last blog entries, and I didn’t expect it to be sold out, but I was surprised that not only the grand-tier seats but also many seats in the center rows were left empty. Even if you are not a fan of nature and wildlife photographs, I expected more interest in Philip Glass at least. Maybe the weather was responsible this time, maybe it was the price, or maybe we were not the only ones who didn’t have the best overall experience with the Meyerhoff and Baltimore Orchestra in the past.
While the performance itself has always been very enjoyable, the preceding sales process wasn’t. Not only was the ticket and schedule information on their website incorrect. The (incredibly arrogant) ticket sales person was also not willing to make a correction. And worse: More recently they took our $120 for another concert but never sent us the tickets. If you find an interesting show, I would strongly suggest you find another venue than the Meyerhoff. I know there are no alternatives in Baltimore, but I promise, it will be worth driving a few more miles for a much more pleasant experience. I will not return until I get an apology and the responsible is fired. It’s not so much about the lost $120, but in the end how we have been treated overall. That was totally unacceptable.
It was also unacceptable that they decided to shorten last Sunday’s concert for no good reason. Nevertheless, the “Journey Through Time” was enjoyable, and the lack of an audience didn’t cause any harm.
During the slideshow I discovered that one picture of the Argentine Horned Frog was indeed used for a cd-cover of the legendary em:t collection! Somehow I find myself running across this label quite often lately. Although Lanting was credited in the inlay of em:t2296 album, I didn’t connect Lanting’s name with this album. So I was very surprised to spot this photo during the presentation. Quite an exciting coincidence!
LIFE: A Journey Through Time is also available as flash-site with music on the web at www.lifethroughtime.com and as a book published by Taschen Verlag.
As a side-note, if you are interested in stunning nature photography I can highly recommend another book titled The Smaller Majority by Piotr Naskrecki. It made its rounds in the press a little while ago because it’s one of the few if not only book that has been printed in Hexachrome, allowing to present photos with a much wider, more brilliant range of colors than possible with the regular 4-color process. This method is normally used in advertising or packaging, but it hasn’t been used for books before. For more information, see also the websites at Harvard or Pantone.
