Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

The first Chapter 11 fallout predicted by the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra occurred yesterday with the appointment of the PO’s excellent first clarinet, Ricardo Morales, as principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic.

As everyone in our beleaguered music world knows, on April 16, after years of mortal combat between management and musicians, the board of directors declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy–the first major U.S. orchestra to do so. Fortunately, concerts will continue, at least for the time being.

Here’s the story: The Philadelphia Orchestra board is tired of living up to its long-term contract agreements, and the musicians are deluded into thinking that worldwide economic crises don’t apply to them. Chapter 11 will allow the board to renegotiate such costly contracts as the musicians’ pension funds. Over the past year a new management, headed by Alison Vulgamore, who proved herself a strong leader in her previous job as president of the Atlanta Symphony, has been trying to convince the musicians of the dire situation, but too many years of distrust stand in the way.

For decades the once-challenging artistic leadership has been content to give its conservative audience what it wanted: superb performances of mostly non-threatening repertoire, presented in a traditional manner. Chief conductor Charles Dutoit has been a frequent guest conductor of the orchestra for 30 years and knows how to get the best out of these extraordinary musicians. As one who has reveled for over four decades in what Stravinsky called the orchestra’s “chinchilla echo,” hearing the ensemble’s annual concerts at Carnegie Hall leaves no doubt that the Philadelphians remain fabulous.

The Swiss conductor has one year to go in his four-year interim appointment between the five-year mismatch of Christoph Eschenbach and the ascension of the young Music Director Designate Yannick Nézet-Séquin (“call me Yannick”) in September 2012. Problem is, Philadelphia audiences have slipped to around 60 percent of capacity for some five years. Will next season’s shockingly rearguard programming sell more tickets in our still-parlous economy? One bright ray of sunlight is that all of Yannick’s concerts early this year were reportedly sold out–indicating audience hibernation rather than extinction. (Balanced against such optimism, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s testy music critic Peter Dobrin was “underwhelmed.”)

I still haven’t recovered from Gramophone‘s December 2008 rating of the world’s top 20 orchestras, in which the Philadelphia Orchestra was scandalously relegated to a “Past Glories” sidebar along with the NBC Symphony (which disbanded in the 1950s after Toscanini’s retirement!) and l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande (which gradually lost its standing after founder Ernest Ansermet’s retirement in 1968 after 50 years).

Nor has Philadelphia. Whether or not one agrees with that panel of 11 international critics, it was a wakeup call that no music lover–player, management, board of directors, subscriber–in the City of Brotherly Love can afford to ignore.

Company Filmed After All

So, in the end, an outfit called Screenvision made a film of the New York Philharmonic’s production of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical, Company. This hilariously jaundiced 1970 take on marriage will be given “a limited number of engagements” in movie theaters beginning June 15. I saw the first of the four Philharmonic performances, on April 7, which was only the second time that orchestra, cast, and crew had actually worked together on the same stage. As reported in a preview piece in the Times, bi-coastal rehearsals were conducted individually via iphone, Skype, and MP3 files. To no surprise, it felt tentative throughout; the later performances were reportedly more secure.

I don’t watch much television, what with my concert schedule, but if these 14 singing actors represent an “all-star cast of television and stage heavyweights,” I’m missing less than I thought. None rose above serious deficiency in personality and vocalism, especially the fatally pallid lead, Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby. Some critics have suggested that the character is intended to be weak; if so, Harris went far beyond the call of duty. Even Patti LuPone, apparently trying to avoid any comparison with Elaine Stritch’s supremely campy Joanne in the original production, made surprisingly little impression.

Nonetheless, Sondheim’s wondrous music and lyrics conquered all, and the Philharmonic’s augmented orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick were a constant pleasure, despite Paul Gemignani’s four-square beat. Sondheim’s lyrics always vex the capacity of the human ear, particularly in a venue as large as the 2,800-seat Avery Fisher Hall. The woman next to me complained that the orchestra was too loud, but the engineers will fix balances in the mix. As I found in the Metropolitan Opera’s HD presentation of Nixon in China, close-ups and more vivid sound will strengthen the performances considerably. I will definitely catch the screening.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/28 Metropolitan Opera. Wagner: Die Walküre. James Levine, cond.; Voigt, Westbroek, Blythe, Kaufmann, Terfel, König.

4/29 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Emanuel Ax, piano. Debussy: Estampes. Messiaen: Couleurs de la cité céleste. Mahler: Symphony No. 5.

4/29 Alice Tully Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; Thomas Hampson, baritone; Gilbert Kalish, piano. Crumb: Selections from Six American Songbooks. Tan Dun: Elegy: Snow in June for Cello and Percussion.

4/30 Carnegie Hall. Bang on a Can All-Stars and Friends; eighth blackbird; Kronos Quartet; So Percussion. Reich: Mallet Quartet (N.Y. premiere). WTC 9/11(N.Y. premiere). 2 x 5 (N.Y. premiere). Double Sextet.

5/1 Alice Tully Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; Gilbert Kalish, Wu Han, pianos; Daniel Druckman, Ayano Kataoka, percussion. Xenakis: Rebounds for Percussion. Bartók: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Crumb: Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III) for Two Amplified Pianos and Percussion.

5/1 Zankel Hall. Christian Tetzlaff, Antje Weithaas, violins. Leclair: Sonata, Op. 3, No. 6. Bartók: Violin Duos. De Bériot: Duo Concertante, Op. 57, No. 1. Ysaye: Sonata for Two Violins in A minor.

5/3 Peter Jay Sharp Theater at the Juilliard School, 5 p.m. Milton Babbitt Memorial. Musical selections.

5/3 Carnegie Hall. The Philadelphia Orchestra/Charles Dutoit; Paul Groves, tenor; Petra Lang, mezzo; Robert Gierlach, bass-baritone; David Wilson-Johnson (baritone); Men of the Philadelphia Singers Chorale. Stravinsky: Apollo. Oedipus Rex.

by Sedgwick Clark

Stephen Sondheim’s Company, with a book by George Furth, is a hilarious, wickedly insightful take on marriage and the difficulty of commitment. It seemed to this adoptive New Yorker the essence of his new home. I saw the original production three times in 1970. At the second one I was in the front row, on audience left. Act II opens with a show stopper called “Side by Side by Side,” which concludes with the entire cast spread across the stage, kick stepping. Right above me was Barbara Barrie as Sarah, the karate wife, at whom I was staring, utterly captivated. She looked down at me and winked. You can’t get that on TV or in the movies!

In the days when record companies thrived, the New York Philharmonic’s unforgettable 1985 performances and RCA recording of Sondheim’s Follies started the trend of Broadway-musical recordings by top orchestras. In 2000 the Philharmonic performed the composer’s Sweeney Todd, with a CD released on the orchestra’s own label. This week the Philharmonic is mounting a semi-staged version of Company on April 7th at 7:30, 8th at 8, and 9th at 2 and 8. Paul Gemignani conducts, and Jonathan Tunick, who orchestrated the original production, will ensure that it sounds as it should.

But something’s missing: As of this writing–3 p.m. on opening night–it may not be recorded. It will not be broadcast on the orchestra’s regular radio series. There won’t be a CD. No PBS Live from Lincoln Center. In an article today about how the cast has rehearsed everywhere but together until dress rehearsal this morning, the New York Times reports that a video will be filmed and shown in movie theaters in June. But the word from the Phil’s p.r. department is still that “the details are being worked out, so we cannot confirm anything yet.” I don’t believe for a moment that the New York Philharmonic is going to mount this Sondheim masterpiece and not make it available in some form. Stay tuned.

Denk Again

I had my say in this space about American pianist Jeremy Denk’s Zankel Hall recital on February 24, but I can’t resist a quick comment about his Carnegie Hall recital debut, replacing an ailing Maurizio Pollini, on March 27. He played Ives’s Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-60,” on the first half. I had listened to his recent recording of the “Concord” for comparison just before setting out for Carnegie. Excellent though the recording and its discmate, the First Piano Sonata, are, Denk’s live traversal was even better–naturally expressive playing, with soulfully nostalgic pianissimos that contrasted perfectly with fist- and armfuls of wild Ivesian fortissimos. Unlike so many pianists of his generation, his sonority never turned harsh in climaxes. He achieved a singing, almost orchestral sound out of an American Steinway that I assume was Carnegie’s house piano–far superior to the disconcertingly mushy Hamburg Steinway played by Yevgeny Kissin three weeks earlier on the same stage. Denk always made sure that Ives’s allusions to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” and others were audible in the layered textures. And was that really “Autumn in NewYork” that Ives keeps slipping in?

The second half was Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which Denk had played in his Zankel recital. I was pleased to note that the initial statement of the theme seemed to move more comfortably than his ultra-slow tempo of before . . . or was I just used to it this time? Whatever the case, the performance as a whole was no less involving, and more than once my eyes rolled at his digital perfection in volatile passagework. Denk was called back again and again, and you know what he played for an encore? Not Bach, but “The Alcotts” movement from the “Concord” Sonata.

An exhilarating afternoon!

Do They Really Mean That?
On Tuesday (4/5) AOL Video ran the following piece about Air New Zealand’s new passenger comeon:

Airline Creates a Very Unique New Seat
An airline creates a new type of class that combines two seats and allows couples to lay together

You’re watching Airline Creates a Very Unique New Seat. See the Web’s top videos on AOL Video

A Schoenberg Trend?

In the next four days, three works by Arnold Schoenberg, the classical king of audience anathema, will be played at Carnegie Hall. Granted, the artists are all stars, works by perennial favorites dominate the programs, and these are not among the Austrian master’s difficult works. Still, today’s artists like–perhaps even love–20th-century music, want to play it, and damn the torpedoes. So on April 7, Leif Ove Andsnes will perform the Austrian master’s Six Little Piano Pieces; James Levine will lead the MET Orchestra in Five Pieces for Orchestra on April 10 at 3:00; and the Tetzlaff Quartet will offer the meatiest Schoenberg work, his 45-minute Quartet No. 1, at Carnegie’s mid-size Zankel Hall at 7:30.

No Joy in Muncie

I was very sorry to see in Musicalamerica.com on March 28 that my home town’s symphony orchestra cancelled its final concert of the season to save $35,000 and not add to its $100,000 deficit. It’s an all-too-typical story: A well-to-do Muncie music lover and his wife used to kick in extra funds in tight economic times, but they died over the past two years. They had lived in Muncie all their lives and were well-known and beloved pillars of the community. Apparently the members of their large family who have remained in Muncie have other commitments.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/7 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Paul Gemignani; soloists. Sondheim: Company.

4/11 Thalia. Cutting-Edge Concerts/Victoria Bond. Works by Brian Ferneyhough, Jeffrey Mumford, Harold Meltzer, Victoria Bond.

4/13 Metropolitan Opera. Berg: Wozzeck. James Levine, cond.; Meier, Skelton, Siegel, Held, Fink.

by Sedgwick Clark

The Juilliard String Quartet has always seemed to me the quintessential American quartet––lean, intense, adventurous in repertoire, living on the edge performance-wise. So it was nice to see that it had received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy in February, along with fellow honorees Julie Andrews and Dolly Parton, among others. The Juilliard is the first classical ensemble to receive the award––in a “special ceremony” held during GRAMMY week, which means that TV mention of the award was relegated to a scrolled list before commercials, the GRAMMY show’s dustbin for old timers and classical artists. No matter: The JSQ deserves recognition no less than Julie and Dolly.

The award came on the heels of ArkivMusic’s welcome reissue last fall of perhaps the Quartet’s greatest recorded achievement: the 1963 cycle of Bartók’s six string quartets. The Juilliard also recorded the cycle in 1950 (which was deservedly inducted into the Recording Academy’s Hall of Fame in 1986) and a digital one in the early 1980s. The early cycle had the distinction of being the first ever and the concomitant virtue of wide-eyed discovery; the digital set was good, if a trifle avuncular for such bracing music. By 1963 the quartets were in the Juilliard players’ bones, and stereo technology could capture, as Alfred Frankenstein wrote in his High Fidelity review, “every one of those curious Bartókian pizzicatos which bound off the fingerboard like pistol shots, every needle-shower of ponticello, every straw-fiddle effect of drone basses and tone without vibrato.”

Arkiv’s CD release sounds superb, matching the excellent LP sonics but with less tape hiss, and James Goodfriend’s excellent notes are printed in full in the accompanying booklet. Moreover, the quartets are sensibly accommodated on three discs, unlike a French CD release from 2001 that crammed the six works onto two discs, requiring the Fourth Quartet to be broken between CDs after the first movement. This set is an absolute must for anyone interested in the greatest quartets after Beethoven’s.

At the same time, Arkiv brought out an excellent CD transfer of the Juilliard’s 1967 recordings of the two Ives quartets. The homespun First (1896) is filled with hymn tunes (“Stand up, stand up for Jesus”) and such songs as “Bringing in the Sheaves.” The Second Quartet is made of similar inspiration in less consonant garb, in three movements: Discussions, Arguments, and “The Call of the Mountains,” ending in “Nearer My God to Thee.” In Arguments, the second violin interrupts a vigorous altercation with a saccharine solo marked “Andante Emasculata,” which in turn is violently rejected by the other players in a fortississimo “Allegro con fisto.” Later the four players have at each other “con fuoco (all mad),” and the movement ends with a brief “Andante con scratchy (as tuning up)” and an abrupt “Allegro con fistiswatto (as a K.O),” right out of the ending of The Rite of Spring. Boys will be boys.

by Sedgwick Clark

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s three-week Hungarian Echoes “festival” of works by Haydn, Ligeti, and Bartók with the New York Philharmonic has become one of the season’s highlights. On Tuesday I heard the second program again, the one with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. To hear this emotionally devastating score played, sung, and conducted so extraordinarily well, twice in the space of four days, is good fortune on a scarcely believable level. Amazingly, these audiences seemed to realize it. Except for the old coot with a catarrh and St. Vitus’s Dance sitting in front of PK, whom she had to reprimand when he flipped open a cell phone to text, the Philharmonic’s notoriously rude audience held its collective breath for over 65 minutes on both nights until E-P lowered his baton. On the way out I ran into my old friend Mary Jane Wright, formerly in the Phil’s subscription department, who recalled past performances of Bluebeard in this hall when audience members began departing 20 minutes into the piece.

If this week’s Philharmonic audiences found Bartók’s dark essay into spiritual loneliness more engaging, no small praise is due to the emotional conviction of the soloists, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and bass Gábor Bretz. There was plenty of eye contact and visible human feeling between two people whose sole actions are disagreement on whether or not to unlock the castle’s seven ominous doors. And they both had voices to knock us for a loop—he the low notes at his first entrance, and she that powerful high C which pinned me to the back of my seat as she opened the fifth door to reveal Bluebeard’s panoramic landholdings. The sudden illumination of the house lights at that point after half an hour of various hues of darkness was heart-stopping, even the second time around. The bass, new to me, was most impressive indeed as he poured out his heart to Judith before she joins his three previous wives behind the seventh door. He clearly deserves to be singing in the States as often as his bio reveals he does in Europe. (How about it, Met?)

Truly, the only misstep of the evening was the artificiality of the recorded sound of the doors opening. The program’s first half offered a pair of nonstop delights: the early Ligeti Concert Românesc (1951), which could have been mistaken for an Enescu rhapsody, and the Haydn Symphony No. 7 (Le Midi), with delicious solo work by concertmaster Glenn Dicterow and first cellist Carter Brey. Both pieces should be played often.

You’ll kick yourself—or at least you should—if you don’t catch Salonen’s third and last program on March 24, 25, or 26: Haydn’s Symphony No. 8 (Le Soir), Ligeti’s Clocks and Clouds, and Bartók’s First Piano Concerto (with Olli Mustonen) and Miraculous Mandarin Suite as the roof-raising finale.

Bartók’s only opera may not have been programmed often at the Phil, but the occasions were auspicious: Kertész (1969), Kubélik (1981), Dohnányi (2006), and now Salonen. Surprisingly, Boulez never did it while music director in the Seventies, but at least he finally got around to it at Carnegie with the Chicago Symphony last season. A word about the Kubélik program: The first of his four performances occurred on Bartók’s centennial, March 25, 1981, paired with the composer’s MUSPAC. Soloists were Tatiana Troyanos and Siegmund Nimsgern, and the live recording was released on the orchestra’s own label in the first of its five ten-CD historic broadcast sets, “New York Philharmonic: The Historic Broadcasts, 1923 to 1987.”

I caught a later performance of Kubélik’s Bluebeard, not the centennial one, because Antal Doráti and the Detroit Symphony were at Carnegie Hall with a pair of all-Bartók concerts. On March 23, György Sándor played the Piano Concerto No. 3, of which he had given the premiere in 1946 with Ormandy and Philadelphia; Bluebeard’s Castle was on the second half. I remember I felt that Doráti had underplayed the massive C major tutti when Judith opens the fifth door, which perplexed me until the moment she walked through the seventh door at the end and the conductor unleashed one of the loudest, most dissonant chords I’ve ever heard. In my best Stagedoor Johnny demeanor I went backstage to tell him of my epiphany, and he said, smiling broadly, “Yes, yes, that’s the climax of the opera!” On the actual centennial, Doráti’s program was Miraculous Mandarin Suite, Violin Concerto No. 2, with Yehudi Menuhin in top form, and Concerto for Orchestra. Wow! Only in New York.

Denk Steps in for Pollini at Carnegie

Pianist Jeremy Denk will make his Carnegie Hall recital debut on Sunday afternoon, playing Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the piece he played a few weeks ago that impressed me so. He’s replacing Maurizio Pollini, who has cancelled his U.S. concert tour due to illness.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

3/24 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen; Olli Mustonen, piano. Haydn: Symphony No. 8 (Le Soir). Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 1; Miraculous Mandarin Suite; Ligeti: Clocks and Clouds.

3/25 Alice Tully Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Mahler: Piano Quartet in A minor. Berg: Piano Sonata, Op. 1; Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 1; Bartók: Piano Quintet.

3/26 Carnegie Hall. Toronto Symphony/Peter Oundjian; Itzhak Perlman, violin. Britten: Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1. John Estacio: Frenergy. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4.

3/27 Carnegie Hall. Jeremy Denk, piano. Ives: Sonata No. 2 (Concord). Bach: Goldberg Variations. (Note: This pianist and program replaces Maurizio Pollini, who cancelled due to illness.)

3/27 Alice Tully Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Belcea Quartet. Mozart: Quartet in B-flat, K. 589. Turnage: new work (NY premiere). Beethoven: Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130, with Grosse Fuge, Op. 133.

3/29 Carnegie Hall. American Symphony/Leon Botstein; Blair McMillen, piano; Miranda Cuckson, violin. Piston: Toccata; Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra; Symphony No. 2; Violin Concerto No. 1; Symphony No. 4.

3/30 Metropolitan Opera. Wagner: Das Rheingold. Fabio Luisi, cond.; Harmer, Blythe, Bardon, R. Croft, Siegel, Terfel, Fink, Selig König.

by Sedgwick Clark

Gustav Mahler was born in 1860 and died in 1911, allowing New Yorkers to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth and the centennial of his death with a pair of symphony cycles just two seasons apart. Neither satisfied.

Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez shared the first cycle, leading the Berlin Staatskapelle in May 2009 at Carnegie Hall. I skipped Danny Come Lately’s Mahler and found the Frenchman’s performances precise but little more. I have undimmed memories of strong Boulez performances of the Third, Sixth, and Eighth with the New York Philharmonic while he was music director in the 1970s, but his efforts this time around seemed aimed at keeping a vastly inferior orchestra together.

Valery Gergiev’s Mahler cycle this season was promising to one who heard the superb Mahler Sixth he gave with the New York Philharmonic in 1998, no less memorable than the live-concert performances I heard by Boulez/NYP (1972), Abbado/NYP (1979), Tennstedt/NYP (1986), and Bernstein/VPO (1988). Interestingly, Gergiev split the cycle between the two orchestras of which he is music director: In October he brought his Mariinsky Orchestra to Carnegie Hall (10/17-24) and in February his London Symphony Orchestra to Avery Fisher Hall (2/23-27).

But disappointment set in immediately with the Mariinsky’s shapeless Sixth Symphony. Moments like his perfectly judged transition to the Allegro moderato in the opening pages of the finale would be offset by his trivializing scamper through the rute episode at rehearsal number 134, after the first hammer blow, which Mahler marks “Powerful, but somewhat measured (completely unnoticeably holding back).” Moreover, Gergiev breezed through the finale’s devastating coda with a shocking lack of conviction. Unlike the Philharmonic performance of 13 years before, he reversed the 1963 Mahler-Gesellschaft revised Critical Edition’s order of the middle movements so that the Andante moderato preceded the Scherzo. I won’t go into the lengthy explanation here. Suffice it to say that Mahler himself performed it both ways and died before he could settle the matter definitively. Scherzo-Andante makes stronger emotional sense to me.

The Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) was also compromised by wayward tempos, often lacking breadth at such crucial moments as the buildup to the mighty choral “Aufersteh’n” toward the end. Felicitous solos by the concertmaster and expressive singing by mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina and soprano Anastasia Kalagina (both rightly placed in back with the chorus) aside, the Mariinsky’s ensemble was rarely truly precise, the boys’ chorus lacked sass, and the offstage horns, placed offstage right, were far too loud. In the early 1980s, John Nelson and the Indianapolis Symphony in the “Resurrection” and Julius Rudel and the Buffalo Philharmonic in Mahler’s early cantata Das Klagende Lied placed the offstage instruments way up outside Carnegie’s balcony, and the effect was magical.

In an outrageous feat of Gergievian brinksmanship, the next evening he followed the “Resurrection” with the choral Eighth—the “Symphony of a Thousand.” While never coming close to the finest concert performance I ever heard—by Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic at Carnegie in 2000—the Russian conductor’s sheer control was mightily impressive. Part I went in one huge sweep, propulsive and dramatic, and Part II hung together as well as this episodic version of the final scene of Goethe’s Faust ever does. Three of the eight vocalists, in particular, stood out: the appealing soprano of Anastasia Kalagina (Una poenitentium), and the leather-lunged baritone Alexei Markov (Pater ecstaticus) and bass Evgeny Nikitin (Pater profundus).

Gergiev proved he was capable of great Mahler the next day with a Fifth Symphony that recalled the first Solti/Chicago (1970), Comissiona/Baltimore (1975), and Bernstein/Vienna (1989) performances in Carnegie. For once the Mariinsky’s playing had the security of adequate rehearsal time and conducting that bespoke thorough identification with the score. At one point in the second movement the frantic turbulence dies down, leaving a lonely cello line to lament expressively. “Even if the rest of his Mahler is a disaster,” I scrawled in the program, “his shaping of the cellos on page 70 is worth the entire cycle.” No less masterfully conducted and paced was the climax of the movement, in keeping with the entire performance. The 70-minute symphony was given on a Friday morning to a largely student—and very attentive—audience.

The Mariinsky musicians got a well-deserved rest on Saturday (10/23) while Gergiev was leading a stunningly well-played Boris Godunov at the Metropolitan Opera.

Gergiev was rehearsing the Mariinsky until the house opened on Sunday afternoon, which didn’t bode well for the Orchestra’s concluding Mahler performances of the Fourth and First Symphonies, and indeed both were disappointing. Pianissimos were rarely quiet, slides in the strings were non-existent (a deficit throughout the Mariinsky performances), and the offstage brass at the beginning of the First were neither “in the distance” nor evocative.

Unlike the Mariinsky, the London Symphony Orchestra’s credentials as a Mahler orchestra are distinguished and long-standing. It came as a shock, therefore, that the first of its performances, of the Seventh Symphony, was ghastly—so unremittingly ugly in sonority as if the LSO or its conductor had never coped with Fisher Hall’s often harsh acoustics. The brass and high woodwinds sheared your ears off, with the strings consistently overbalanced. Stop-go-stop-go went the first movement. The two Nachtmusik movements were devoid of charm, nostalgia, and warmth. The hare-brained finale never cohered. Only the central Scherzo, with its teeth-chattering triplets, queasy portamentos, and bump-in-the-night percussive effects, succeeded in capturing the movement’s appropriate grotesquerie.

The LSO seemed a different orchestra two days later in the Third Symphony—comparatively full-toned and warmly balanced, with brass that made their point without overwhelming the strings. After the Seventh, I was relieved that for most of the piece Gergiev seemed inspired by the Third’s paean to Nature. This is the symphony about which Mahler told his visiting friend Bruno Walter, who was admiring the surrounding mountains, “No need to look. I have composed all this already!” The varied sections of the 34-minute opening movement marched ahead exuberantly. The middle movements went well, including an immaculately played posthorn solo, again compromised severely by its placement just offstage. Gergiev chose a moderate tempo for the slow finale that he sustained well until the last page, which Mahler indicates “Not with crude force! Richly full, noble tone.” At this point Gergiev lost all conviction and doubled the tempo, with brass blatting and timpani pounding with crude force, negating all positive feelings that had come before.

In the final concert of the cycle, Gergiev turned in a decent performance of the Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Symphony and a brisk reading of Mahler’s last completed work, the Ninth. Most impressive in the latter was the savage Rondo-Burleske, an effective but skin-deep effort that Mahler wrote to prove to his critics that he too could write counterpoint. There was a good deal of clipping the music’s full note values at crucial moments and speeding up unnecessarily. And in the section prior to the finale’s climax, which Mahler marks Stets sehr gehalten (“still holding back”), he doubled the tempo, vitiating the impact of the climax.

For readers who didn’t share my letdown, Gergiev has recorded the Mahler cycle with the LSO on the orchestra’s own label.  

Walking the Dogs

I was walking our three Bichon Frises the other evening, and a woman and her husband, both middle-aged, approach and she exclaims, “How beautiful! Are those Bichon Freeze?” I assent and she continues to extol their virtues. “They don’t shed, do they?” she asks (more a statement). “No,” I answer. “Well, I want a Pomeranian,” she says. “Do they shed?” I ask. “Yes. My husband will be very upset.” “Then why would you get one?” I ask. “Because I want it,” she huffs. I turn to the husband, who stands there mute, smiling, and I say, “You had better have a serious talk with her tonight.” She frowns at me and says, “Well, I’m getting one!” and marches off with the husband in tow.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

3/19 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen; Michelle DeYoung, mezzo; Gábor Bretz, bass. Ligeti: Concert Românesc. Haydn: Symphony No. 7 (Le Midi). Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle.

3/21 Metropolitan Opera. Tchaikovsky: Queen of Spades. Andris Nelsons, cond.; Karita Mattila, Dolora Zajick, Vladimir Galouzine, Peter Mattei.

3/23 Zankel Hall. Midori, violin; Charles Abramovic, piano. Works by Huw Watkins, Toshio Hosokawa, James MacMillan, John Adams.

3/24 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen; Olli Mustonen, piano. Haydn: Symphony No. 8 (Le Soir). Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 1; Miraculous Mandarin Suite; Ligeti: Clocks and Clouds.

3/25 Alice Tully Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Mahler: Piano Quartet in A minor. Berg: Piano Sonata, Op. 1; Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 1; Bartók: Piano Quintet.

3/26 Carnegie Hall. Toronto Symphony/Peter Oundjian; Itzhak Perlman, violin. Britten: Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1. John Estacio: Frenergy. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4.

3/27 Alice Tully Hall. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Belcea Quartet. Mozart: Quartet in B-flat, K. 589. Turnage: new work (NY premiere). Beethoven: Quartet in B-flat, Op. 130, with Grosse Fuge, Op. 133.

3/31 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Michael Tilson Thomas; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin. Prokofiev: American Overture. Gubaidulina: In Tempus Praesens (Violin Concerto). Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 (Little Russian).

by Sedgwick Clark

Last Wednesday night (2/16) the American pianist Jeremy Denk performed—”relived” would be more accurate—a bracing recital of Ligeti’s Études and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Last May he was soloist in an ideal performance of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, with John Adams conducting the ACJW Ensemble. In numerous live and recorded performances over 45 years, I had thought the Concerto an ungrateful piece, gnarled and humorless. What a difference rhythmic security, seamless transitions, and puckish humor make—nothing less than a revelation!

It was these sparkling qualities that caused jaws to drop and eyes to crinkle in Denk’s brilliant rendering of the finger-busting Ligeti pieces. Fistfuls of notes dovetailed with seeming effortlessness, allowing an ideal balance of virtuosity with the composer’s inherent wit and warmth. No less important was the piano tone—clear but never brittle. Those same qualities distinguished the GoldbergVariations. Once past an overly slow introductory Aria, the 30 variations and concluding Aria da Capo clearly delighted a sold-out house. Another addition to my wee “don’t miss” artist list.

He’s also recorded both Ives Piano Sonatas for his own label, which I haven’t heard but will ASAP. It’s available, and also a more recent Bach Partitas CD, on his Web site, Think Denk.

His next New York appearance is as guest pianist in the Ives Piano Trio with the Ensemble ACJW at Le Poisson Rouge on March 20.

Adams and Nixon
And speaking of John Adams, he’s been in town lately to conduct the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of his first opera, Nixon in China. I remember a colleague returning from the 1987 premiere in Houston and declaring that it was the best opera he had ever seen. The Nonesuch recording and memory of Robert Spano’s 1999 Brooklyn Philharmonic concert performance at BAM whetted my appetite for the Met production, which I saw on February 9. (Spano was there too.)

Why, then, my disappointment? Because of the cartoonish sets, basically a duplication of the original production? The not-always-precise playing in Act I (it improved later)? Or the failure of the original Nixon, James Maddalena, to project in the Met’s vast space? The others sang effectively. However, whether the result of Alice Goodman’s libretto or Peter Sellars’s direction, I couldn’t hack Pat Nixon (Janis Kelly) as Debbie Reynolds (Singin’ in the Smog?) or Henry Kissinger (Richard Paul Fink) as a caricature out of Oh! Calcutta! Madame Mao (Kathleen Kim) and Chou En-lai (Russell Braun) came off best as characters and performers. The New York Times‘s former editor Max Frankel was on that China trip, and in a fascinating February 10 op-ed piece he discussed how Nixon in China jibed with reality. While recognizing the importance of artistic license he ultimately agreed with Shakespeare, “who chose a century as the minimal safe distance between actual events and his iambic-speaking kings.”

I caught the live HD broadcast three days later in East Hampton for another look. The differences between sitting in Row I in the orchestra section of the cavernous Met auditorium and watching a screen in an intimate movie theater—at least in Nixon—were all in the broadcast’s favor: The close-ups of the singers lent far greater immediacy to the story, and the singers were all perfectly audible—most conspicuously James Maddalena, who, I was reliably informed by a colleague attending the performance, was no less difficult to hear than three days before. (So why hadn’t the body mikes boosted his voice adequately in the house?) The production benefited too. It’s reasonable to believe that a (or perhaps even the) major concern of Gelb-era set designs is filmability. The original director, Peter Sellars, had changed a few things—none of them for the better, reported Patrick J. Smith in his Musical America.com review. One of Sellars’s new inspirations was to further vulgarize the libretto’s satirical portrait of Henry Kissinger; interestingly, in the HD broadcast, also directed by Sellars, the cameras averted their eyes during the most offensive moment, when the Kissinger character pumps his hips vigorously at his Chinese translator.

But if I can’t join most of my colleagues in praising the Met’s Nixon, Adams the conductor continues to impress. He led the Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last Friday (2/18) in City Noir, his affectionate tribute to moody1940s film scores that he composed for Gustavo Dudamel’s inaugural gala as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in October 2009. The LA team performed it at Lincoln Center last May, and I enjoyed it even more under the composer’s purposeful baton. He prefaced his work with a taut, expressive reading of Strauss’s Don Juan, reminding me of Fritz Reiner’s 1954 Chicago recording in its near-identical timing and several dramatic details, and Bartók’s rollicking Dance Suite. In both performances I was struck by rhythmic niceties I’d never heard before—clear as could be in the score but ignored by numerous big-name conductors.

Who Says Classical Music is Dead?
I asked the Times‘s Anthony Tommasini last night at the opening of Lincoln Center’s Tully Scope festival if his mail had increased since the end of his “Top Ten Greatest Composers” series, which I wrote about in my last blog (2/4). Over 2,700, he replied—1,200 more since the final article ran. Dear Congressmen and women: I’ll bet they vote too.

Looking Forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:

2/23 Avery Fisher Hall. London Symphony/Valery Gergiev. Mahler: Symphony No. 7.

2/24 Alice Tully Hall. Tully Scope Festival. Axiom. Feldman: Rothko Chapel; Bass Clarinet and Percussion. Kurtág: Hommage à R. Sch; Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova.

2/25 mat. Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Paavo Järvi; Janine Jansen, violin. Tüür: Aditus. Britten: Violin Concerto. Beethoven: Symphony No. 5.

2/25 Avery Fisher Hall. London Symphony/Valery Gergiev. Mahler: Symphony No. 3.

2/26 Walter Reade Theater. 2:00: Mahler documentary featuring Alma and Anna Mahler, Henry-Louis de la Grange.  4:30: Mahler interpreters, Bruno Walter, Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein; complete Symphony No. 4 with Vienna Philharmonic/Bernstein and soprano Edith Mathis.

2/27 mat. Avery Fisher Hall. London Symphony/Valery Gergiev. Mahler: Symphony No. 9 and Adagio from Symphony No. 10.

2/28 Carnegie Hall. Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä; Lisa Batiashvili, violin. Beethoven: Violin Concerto. Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 6 and 7.

3/1 Carnegie Hall. Philadelphia Orchestra/Charles Dutoit; Vadim Repin, violin. Berlioz: Overture to Béatrice et Bénédict. James MacMillan: Violin Concerto. Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5.

3/2 Zankel Hall. Making Music: all James MacMillan

by Sedgwick Clark

It’s one thing to list one’s ten favorite composers and another to maintain that these are the “greatest” composers of all time, which is what the New York Times‘s chief classical-music critic Anthony Tommasini did in an admittedly “preposterous”-seeming exercise that began while I was on vacation. The man’s got moxie, that’s for sure.

By virtue of the paper he writes for, Tony’s the target of every classical-music crackpot in the world, especially the opera nuts. They all think they know better. Besides his daily reviews he has to dream up features and “think pieces” regularly, and in this latter case he set upon a real doozy: He would select the top ten classical composers of all time, in order, and in the process clarify “what exactly about the master composers makes them so astonishing.” I’m not sure he was any more successful than Budd Schulberg was with What Makes Sammy Run? in discovering the basis of human nature, but I’ll say one thing: He made me think. For two weeks he kept readers in suspense in a five-article series, tipping his hat to personal but improbable favorites like Britten and teasing readers with such possibilities as Chopin instead of Brahms. He was rewarded by “more than 1,500 informed, challenging, passionate and inspiring comments” from readers. His final picks were revealed on Sunday, January 23, and last weekend the Times came full circle, printing excerpts from several readers’ responses.

So who are the Greatest in Tony’s book?

1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

2. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

4. Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

5. Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

6. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

7. Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

8. Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

9. Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

10. Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

All greats, no doubt, sensibly ranked. Since I decided to write this blog entry, I’ve been lying in bed late and waking up early, contemplating whom I would include. I’m especially happy to see Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartók—the leaders of my favorite century in music—on Tony’s list. (I’ve often thought I should have been born around the time of Afternoon of a Faun, but then my wife reminds me that indoor plumbing and antibiotics hadn’t been invented, and my Romantic illusions fade.) Debussy’s is my favorite piano music in the entire literature, bar none—the most beautiful, elusive, sensuous, and sensual use of 240 strings I know. There’s hardly a single succession of notes in his mature output that fails to pass my goose bump test. Stravinsky? He’s my default composer; his Rite of Spring changed my life. I can’t imagine life without Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle or Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta or the solo concertos or Concerto for Orchestra.

However.

Tommasini’s artificial exclusion of “one of the Vienna Four” in order to include enough Romantic and 20th-century composers is impossible. You either belong or don’t belong on such a list, and there’s no conceivable way that Haydn should be knocked off to include Bartók. Personally I’d eliminate Schubert and rank Haydn before Mozart, but then it’s not my list. I’ll just say that CDs of this most warm-hearted, infinitely witty, and human composer’s music resound in my music room more than those of any other composer, usually in Bernstein performances. Sony has packaged a convenient set of all of Bernstein’s Columbia recordings (88697 480452), most with the New York Philharmonic. And his 1984 recording of the “Oxford” Symphony No. 92 (Deutsche Grammophon 413 777-2) has been foisted on more unwitting visitors than probably any disc in my collection.

P.S. My fellow blogger Alan Gilbert also wrote on this subject this week, and I deliberately refrained from reading it until filing my own ruminations. I look forward now to seeing what he has to say.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

2/8 Thalia at Symphony Space. Mahler Society President Lewis Smoley and baritone Thomas Hampson discuss Mahler.

2/9 Metropolitan Opera. Adams: Nixon in China.

by Sedgwick Clark

Nothing beats vacationing in St. Martin with wife and friends who desire nothing more than just an ordinary nap. Or a vigorous game of bridge! One of our friends is a Bronze Life Master. He’s incredibly patient with the rest of us and would make an ideal teacher. He brought two classy decks of cards put out by the Metropolitan Opera for its centennial production of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West with Deborah Voigt in the title role. Toscanini conducted the world premiere at the Met in 1910 with Enrico Caruso as the outlaw bandit Dick Johnson. We’ve all seen the famous production photo where a posse is about to string him up, only to have Minnie (Emmy Destinn) save him at the last minute. It’s too big for a bridge card, so the Met puts a posed photo of the great tenor in costume on one deck. On the other is a posed costume shot of Renata Tebaldi as Minnie in 1970. Opera-loving card sharks should hie to the Met Gift Shop posthaste.

Uninterrupted Reading

It’s the only time of the year for me. Several years ago here I was able to finish Richard Osborne’s tome on Herbert von Karajan after months of struggling to find the time in New York. A couple of days ago I finished A Family Affair, the final book of Rex Stout’s 52 Nero Wolfe mysteries (my third traversal of the canon), and now I’m a quarter of the way through John Canarina’s The New York Philharmonic: From Bernstein to Maazel, which I’ll report on presently. At home, Leon Fleisher’s new autobio, written with Anne Midgette, and Alex Ross’s recent compendium of New Yorker essays await. And I’d still like to say something pithy about James M. North’s masterful discographies of New York Philharmonic and Boston Symphony recordings. Soon.

by Sedgwick Clark

Seiji Ozawa’s fight with esophageal cancer and subsequent attack of sciatica has been increasingly in the news as Carnegie Hall’s JapanNYC festival approached. Artistic director of the festival, Ozawa was scheduled to lead three taxing concerts at Carnegie this week. Earlier this year he canceled nearly all his concerts worldwide, including his final season as music director of the Vienna State Opera, obviously with an eye to keeping his JapanNYC conducting commitments. Ghastly close-up photos accompanying articles in the Times, made the 75-year-old conductor look 20 years older. Then, a week ago, Carnegie announced that, to conserve energy, he would only lead the second half of the first two concerts. Would he make it?

He did. Triumphantly.

I remember the proud Karajan in his final Carnegie concerts in 1989, walking onstage with evident pain and mounting a specially designed podium with a small, built-in seat, invisible to most of the audience, on which he could rest his rump while leading the Vienna Philharmonic. Eugen Jochum sat in his last Carnegie Hall appearance, conducting the Bamberg Symphony in 1983. Whatever physical infirmity these conductors had to endure, it was clear that their intellectual and musical powers hadn’t waned—which is also the current-day case with Levine, Previn, and now Ozawa. I had images of poor old Otto Klemperer in 1970 being carried to the podium for his last concerts, like Karajan and Jochum to lead Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.

It was thus with great relief at Carnegie on Tuesday that the diminutive Japanese conductor walked onstage, his trademark smile aglow, along with his Saito Kinen Orchestra players. He was just one of the guys, conveniently avoiding a solo bow.

Brahms’s First Symphony was one of Ozawa’s party pieces during his Boston Symphony days—as was Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which he led on the second half of Wednesday night’s Saito Kinen concert. Both were fleet, energetic, young men’s interpretations back then, with the Brahms almost Toscaninian in its propulsive, dramatic drive. But it also seemed a trifle glib in its ease of utterance. On Tuesday night, however, the first movement in particular was broader, more inflected and expressive. Ozawa’s flowing tempo for Brahms’s second movement Andante sostenuto was a welcome change from the funereal pace set by most conductors these days, and the third movement had his usual balletic grace. He had been sitting through much of the performance, but he stood for most of the finale, urging his Saito Kinen players forward in the customary demonstrative Ozawa manner to a rousing coda.

Finally given a chance, the audience leapt to its feet, cheering wildly. Ozawa delayed a solo bow as long as possible, shaking hands with what looked like every member of the orchestra. A jam-packed phalanx of TV cameras in the back of the hall took the proceedings down, and NHK interviewers were out on the street to film spontaneous reactions.

The first half of the concert, conducted by Ozawa protégé Tatsuya Shimono, revealed an orchestra of whiplash precision and recording-studio perfection of balance and intonation in Decathexis, a new work by the young Japanese composer Atsuhiko Gondai. Those of us who enjoy this sort of expertly made orchestral etude, with scores that look like wiring diagrams and roots hailing back to Penderecki, Ligeti, and Xenakis, had fun for 17½ minutes, but the tepid applause indicated that we were in the minority.

More to the majority’s liking was an absolutely splendid Beethoven Third Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida at her heartfelt, lapidary best and an ideal accompaniment led by Shimono.

An exciting evening, no doubt.

Looking forward

No more concerts until the new year!

by Sedgwick Clark

“It’s been two and a half months since you’ve blogged,” e-wailed Web editor Susan Elliott the other day. “Your numbers have tanked, and soon no one will remember you.  Let someone else walk the dogs, OK?”

“Gotta get those commas right,” I pled.

     Once upon a deadline dreary, while I proofread, weak and weary,
     Over many a quaint and curious typo of forgotten lore—
     While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
     As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my office door.
    “‘Tis some editor,” I muttered, “tapping at my office door—
                                                         Only this and nothing more.”

I never expected to be in deadline hell for so long. But the light shines bright at the end of the tunnel: The 2011 MA Directory is in the mail, and on Monday we honor four distinguished musicians and an Educator of the Year at our annual Musical America Awards ceremony. Susan will have a full report next week. When last I wrote in this space (September 22), I urged you to read the backstage insights of Musical America‘s new blogger, New York Philharmonic Music Director Alan Gilbert. I hope you’ve been enjoying his blogs as much as I have from my self-imposed distance. I’m actually looking forward to blogging again. I intend to mix comments on the new and the notable old, beginning this week with the most recent concert I’ve heard—all-Boulez at the Miller—and continuing with Carnegie Hall’s season openers with the Vienna Philharmonic, which I had begun writing about in early October but had to set aside.

Pierre Boulez’s “Last” 85th-Birthday Celebration
That’s what Ara Guzelimian called it with a laugh as he began his post-intermission interview with Boulez at New York’s jam-packed Miller Theatre on Monday evening. The French composer-conductor (b. March 26, 1925) has been feted internationally for the past year. It must have been a relief for Boulez, in the latest of the Miller’s Composer Portrait series, not to have to lift a finger to hear several of his works performed expertly by a crack group of dedicated young musicians.

The Talea Ensemble, new to me, and conducted by James Baker, performed Dérive 1 (1984) and Dérive 2 (1988/2006); Improvisation I and II sur Mallarmé (1957), sung with seeming effortlessness by Mary Elizabeth Mackenzie. Pianist Anthony Cheung played the 12 Notations (1945), effectively Boulez’s opus 1, although he did not officially dub them so. 

What struck me vividly as I listened was the ease with which these once intimidating works fell on my ears. I’ve heard all of them in concert and on record, except for the most recent—and quite extended—version of Dérive 2, of which this was the U. S. premiere. Most have been conducted by the composer, whose gift in the most complex music has always been to make it sound less fearsome. His stated goal for taking up conducting was to acquaint audiences with the 20th-century classics, which would make it easier to understand new music. My guess is that both conductor and audience had a salutary effect on each other over the years.

I’m not qualified to analyze Boulez’s music—or that of Elliott Carter, who at nearly 102 had come to honor his young friend. I just like to listen to it. So I was pleased to hear Charles Rosen, who recorded Boulez’s First and Third Piano Sonatas in the early 1970s, and is well versed with the idiom, praise the performances when we spoke at intermission. I also found Paul Griffiths’ program notes uncommonly illuminating, especially in his explanation of Boulez’s “ideal of music as ‘a universe in continuous expansion'” and his commitment to compositional “openendedness.” (Too bad that the type was so small and the hall so dark!)

At least four important Boulez CDs were released this year, each with at least one new work in his discography. From Deutsche Grammophon came (1) the final release in his Mahler cycle, which includes the Wunderhorn Songs, with soprano Magdalena Kozená and baritone Christian Gerhaher, and the Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Symphony, (2) Ravel’s two piano concertos and solo Miroirs with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and, (3) best of all, Boulez’s first recordings of music by Szymanowski, the Violin Concerto No. 1, with Christian Tetzlaff, and the Third Symphony. These artists bring out the expressive best in each other, and the Vienna Philharmonic plays ravishingly. Boulez told me he’d like to record the Second Violin Concerto with Tetzlaff; the Second Symphony and Symphonie concertante, with Aimard, would make ideal discmates. (4) From the Chicago Symphony’s own label, Chicago Resound, came an all-Stravinsky CD of Pulcinella (complete), Four Etudes for Orchestra, and Symphony in Three Movements.

Vienna Philharmonic x 4 Opens Carnegie
This hallowed orchestra opened Carnegie Hall’s new season with a colossal conductorial mismatch: the dithering doyen of the authentic-performance movement, 80-year-old Nicolaus Harnoncourt, and the hottest young maestro on the planet, the volcanic Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel. So much for my alliterative amusement. The first work in the all-Beethoven opener was the Piano Concerto No. 1. The soloist was Lang Lang, who has perhaps the most beautiful, varied color palette of any pianist before the public today. He just hasn’t always had the taste to go along with it. He underplayed the opening movement of the First until the lengthy cadenza, which he assaulted with Rachmaninoffian thunder. And so it went: power vs. priss. As for the accompaniment, by the end of the very first phrase in the strings—only five seconds—Harnoncourt had weakened the cadence with a diminuendo and taken a prolonged breath before allowing the strings to repeat the phrase a step higher. Fussy to no purpose. I leaned over to my seatmate and whispered, “I’m ready to leave.” Decorum dictated that we remain, but at intermission we fled into the night, skipping the Seventh Symphony. Several friends later told me they wished they had done the same.

For his second concert Harnoncourt led Smetana’s paean to Bohemia, Má Vlast (My Homeland), a folk-nationalist cycle of six symphonic poems of which the second, The Moldau, is a universal favorite. This time, with less fuss from the podium and more vibrato from the Vienna strings, one could revel in much gorgeous playing—such as the ravishing pianissimo strings in the fugato of the fourth piece, From Bohemia’s Fields and Forests. Still, with tighter ensemble the results throughout could have been magical.

The magic was reserved for Dudamel’s concerts. As with his pair of Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts at Lincoln Center last season, interpretive misgivings were soon forgotten. In the first of his concerts, Rossini’s Overture to La gazza ladra was unaccountably rushed and coarse. But Spanish-Cuban-American composer Julián Orbón’s Tres versions sinfónicas (1954) was played with delightfully idiomatic flavor. Go figure. Bernstein’s quarter-hour, eight-movement Divertimento for Orchestra (1980) has moments of his trademark swagger, but it’s a trifle. Dudamel palpably loves it. Two stately dances by Ravel closed the concert. The somber little Pavane pour une infant défunte initially intrigued but ultimately bored. Boléro revelled in superb solo playing, but Dudamel began at such a ppppp that it was several minutes before the snare drum rhythm was clear.

The full-throated Vienna Philharmonic sonority finally emerged the next afternoon. Brahms’s Tragic Overture suffered from the “slow-is-profound” syndrome; give me Toscanini’s whiplash brand of tragedy from 1937. Schumann’s Cello Concerto can be a turgid affair, and I would have preferred sharper orchestral attacks, but Dudamel never covered soloist Yo-Yo Ma, who played at the top of his considerable form. Ma’s duet with the VPO’s first-chair cellist in the middle movement was the high point of the concert if you don’t count his Bach encore. It’s fashionable to denigrate Ma as having sold out or being past his prime. Don’t believe it for a second.

Wary of wearing them out, I consciously avoid such ubiquitous masterpieces as Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony, but I wouldn’t have missed this performance for the [new] world. Those glorious Vienna string players sang out fortissimo, smiling at one other as if let off their leashes at last. Often, as the violins played the top melody, one’s ears perked up as the violas and cellos revealed fresh details, and all contributed lovely touches of portamento throughout. Dudamel’s extreme slowing for the first movement’s third theme may not have pleased everyone, but its excess was emotionally convincing. The second-movement Largo was very slow, with a heart-breaking rendering of the English horn solo. Momentum sagged a bit in the finale, and the coda’s shaping was definitely personal. But what living, breathing, red-blooded music-making, reminiscent of Bernstein and Rostropovich at their peak! Critics who nitpick Dudamel’s performances miss the forest for the trees.

The Classical Letterman
David Letterman usually concludes his show with a rock band. Just as I was finishing this blog, he closed with a classical artist, of all things. The British trumpeter Alison Balsom, whom Harris Goldsmith hailed as a rising young star in the 2008 MA Directory, played a Marcello Allegro from her latest EMI CD, “Italian Concertos.” The audience applauded fervently. So tell me, what ails classical music?

Looking Forward
My week’s scheduled concerts:
12/10 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Colin Davis; Nikolaj Znaider, violin. Mozart: Symphony No. 36; Elgar: Introduction and Allegro; Violin Concerto.
12/14 Carnegie Hall. JapanNYC Festival. Saito Kinen Orchestra/Tatsuya Shimono and Seiji Ozawa; Mitsuko Uchida, piano. Works by Gondai, Beethoven, and Brahms.
12/15 Metropolitan Opera. Verdi: Don Carlo.