Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

Gardiner’s “Authentic” Missa solemnis

I was driving with a friend over Thanksgiving weekend, and we tuned in during the middle movement of a Sibelius Violin Concerto on Sirius FM. I was quickly enthralled by the soloist’s rubato and technical command and declared him to be “an old Russian violinist.” When I heard the double basses’ pianississimo in the last five bars, barely audible yet with firm tone, I had no doubt: “This is the 1959 Heifetz with Hendl and the Chicago Symphony.” Indeed, it was. But what pleased me more than my good guess was that for years I have considered it inferior to the violinist’s 1937 recording with Beecham. The later recording’s freedom, especially in the finale’s wild accelerating into climaxes and subsequent backing off as the temperature cools, bothered me in my youth, but last week I reveled in it. The recording hadn’t changed, but I had!

I keep hoping I’ll change in my appreciation of “period” performances. Alas, except for a couple of pages at the beginning and end of the Adagio section of the Credo, where he managed to elicit momentary meaning and emotion, John Eliot Gardiner’s performance of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir at Carnegie (11/17) was his typically punctilious reading of notes on the wretched-sounding, so-called stylistically correct instruments that many find to be illuminating. With Colin Davis’s awe-inspiring interpretation with the London Symphony Orchestra’s modern instruments last season indelibly imprinted in my memory (10/27/11), Gardiner’s puny conception couldn’t hope to compete. The Times’s new lady on the aisle, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, filed a more welcoming point of view on 11/19.

Frühbeck’s “Charmingly Unstylish” Mozart

Far more to my liking, on 10/26 with the New York Philharmonic, was Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos’s charmingly old-fashioned account of Mozart’s Serenata notturna. In the Menuetto’s Trio, for the four principal strings, he didn’t even conduct but sat back and smiled while they played. (George Szell conducted solos.) Frühbeck was Musical America’s Conductor of the Year in 2011, and I went backstage to say hello. “I loved your Mozart!” I said in greeting him, and he laughed broadly. “Well, you know, that’s the way we all played Mozart when I was young. I know it’s not the way young conductors do it today, but I like it that way. The Philharmonic is such a great orchestra, and I love to conduct them. I’m going to do Heldenleben next season,” he confided with great relish.

Frühbeck had looked fine back in June, when he conducted Carmina burana, but not now. He had lost weight and walked to the podium with great effort and sat while conducting. I spoke with a friend in the orchestra, who told me that he had had stomach cancer; but his doctor assured him that his recent surgery was completely successful, and she said that he had conducted as if he had a new lease on life. The Philharmonic musicians played their hearts out for him in Mahler’s First. Next summer he will conduct the Boston Symphony in Mahler’s Third in the opening weekend at Tanglewood.

DiDonato’s Drama Queens

Kansas mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is irresistible, a self-evident statement to the some 2,800 music lovers who delighted at her catchily dubbed “Drama Queens” recital a couple of Sunday afternoons ago (11/18). The program encompassed a selection of arias from Baroque operas that depict queens and royalty, including works from Orlandini’s Berenice, Cesti’s Oronotea, Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, Radamisto, and Alesandro, Giacomelli’s Merope, Hasse’s Antonio e Cleopatra, Porta’s Ifigenia in Aulide, and Handel’s Giulio Cesare, plus orchestral works by Vivaldi and Scarlatti. She’s presenting this recital internationally for the next year, and Virgin Classics just released her recording of it. Her backup band, Il Complesso Barocco, with Dmitry Sinkovsky as director and violinist, was ideal.

Philharmonia on My Mind

Everyone at Avery Fisher Hall was talking about the ravishing sound of the Philharmonia Orchestra. It wasn’t that Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Mahler’s Ninth (11/18) and a semi-staged version of Berg’s Wozzeck (11/19) was small potatoes. The Philharmonia has a noble tradition for its beauty of sound. Created just after World War II by Walter Legge primarily as a recording orchestra, its timbre was honed by Furtwängler and Karajan in many recordings that have never left the catalogue. Klemperer was its most visible leader from the mid 1950s through the end of the next decade, with memorable concerts and recordings during that time by Giulini and Frühbeck de Burgos. But its direction and reputation had begun to falter during Klemperer’s decline in the late 1960s, which led to a freelance image buoyed by occasional appearances by such notables as Boult and Barbirolli.

But no one could remember when the orchestra last played in New York. The most recent I could recall was in November 1971, when the orchestra was named the New Philharmonia and Avery Fisher was still called Philharmonic Hall: Lorin Maazel led crack renditions of Sibelius’s Seventh, Delius’s Paris, and Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite, conducting the latter’s hectic final dance with his rear end.

Calls to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall’s Archives revealed that the Philharmonia graced Fisher Hall most recently in January 2002 with Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting. Prior to that were concerts in March 1988 and January 1990 conducted by the orchestra’s then-principal conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli, an interesting but variable maestro. The ensemble’s most recent New York appearance was in a pair of Carnegie concerts in October 2003 with Christoph von Dohnányi (in works by Bruckner, Wagner, Haydn, Brahms—no wonder I didn’t go), a maestro whose sole distinction, to my ears, lies in performances of the New Vienna School and complex 20th-century works.

So perhaps the way to get the orchestra noticed is to play compelling programs, eh? I have no doubt that E-P wanted the audience to make the connection of Mahler’s final completed symphony (1909) with Berg’s first opera (sketches begun in spring 1914, orchestral score finished eight years later, premiere performance by the Berlin Opera under Erich Kleiber on December 14, 1925). In other words, had Mahler lived, the late-Romantic language of his valedictory Ninth Symphony would have developed into the ripely atonal world of Berg’s Wozzeck.

In the Mahler, Salonen’s tightly knit opening movement was most impressive, avoiding the incoherent sprawl of many current performances. Still, the triple-forte climax, which Mahler marks “with utmost violence,” could have been more cataclysmic (where was the tam-tam?). The middle movements lacked character, and the finale was shapeless. The brass did not always avoid the Fisher Hall glare but otherwise played with distinction. Woodwinds were infallible throughout, with honors going to the bassoons and contrabassoon. And the strings! Their consistent beauty of tone, from whispered pianissimi to massed fortissimi, and attention to Mahler’s frequent portamento indications were the highlight of the afternoon.

In Wozzeck the next evening, the Philharmonia was simply astonishing, conjuring up orchestral wonderment that even surpassed the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under James Levine. However—and it’s a big however—Salonen allowed the orchestra to cover the singers so often that their only recourse was to bellow (the Berg Bark?). Of the major roles, heard from audience right in Row V, only Angela Denoke’s touching Marie and Tijl Faveyts’s cheerfully demented Doctor went unscathed. In the end, frustrating though the vocal balance may have been, the tradeoff of hearing Berg’s orchestral writing played so magnificently won the day for me. And if a recording was made in London before setting off on tour, the engineers can fix it in the mix!

Salonen is the Philharmonia’s current beau, and judging from the clamorous audience response he may turn out to be what the orchestra-lovers’ doctor ordered. Lincoln Center already has two major Brit bands as regular tenants—the London Symphony and London Philharmonic—and it would behoove Jane Moss and company to add the Philharmonia to its stable ASAP.

Looking Forward

12/1 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert; Gil Shaham, violin. Steven Stucky: Symphony. Barber: Violin Concerto. Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances.

by Sedgwick Clark

Atlanta Symphony/Spano

My broadest exit smiles so far this season occurred the same week at Carnegie Hall featuring programs with a chorus: the Philadelphia Orchestra and Westminster Symphonic Choir (Joe Miller, director) under Yannick Nézet-Seguin in Verdi’s Requiem on 10/23 and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Norman Mackenzie, director) under Robert Spano on 10/27.

The first, about which I enthused in this space on 10/25, is one of those pieces one simply cannot miss at Carnegie. The Atlanta program was equally enticing in its own way, a satisfying amalgam of works laced in jazz rhythms and irresistible melody: Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, and Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. Ensemble was occasionally wayward in the Copland, but the two choral works were knockouts. If the Psalms lacked the composer’s manic energy, Spano’s spacious warmth offered numerous beauties in this most affecting of Bernstein’s concert works; the use of a countertenor (John Holiday) in the second-movement solo provided more vocal assurance than the prescribed boy sopranos I’ve heard, although one might argue that a certain innocence was lost. Best of all was the Belshazzar, in which Walton’s episodic structure was given welcome continuity without ever shortchanging the work’s pagan exhilaration. It completely surpassed a hectic affair in 1976 at Carnegie by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Georg Solti, the only other live performance I recall hearing. That this fine orchestra is confronting a $20 million deficit and that musician ranks will be reduced along with a 20 percent cut in salaries is shameful.

Cleveland Orchestra/ Welser-Möst

My word, the Cleveland Orchestra makes a beautiful sound under Franz Welser-Möst these days (11/13)! The downside is that I don’t recall ever hearing so many dropped programs and undefined thumps at a concert. W-M’s overly refined Beethoven Fourth was ho-hum. The Grosse fuge later in the program was much more involved. But it’s not really a “nice” piece, Franz, and I’m afraid the sumptuous Cleveland strings will pale in memory next to the electrifyingly precise Minnesota/ Vänskä earthshaker in March 2010. The gentlemanly rendering of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy at the close seemed positively perverse with such an interpretive engine available to him. I remember a Comissiona/Baltimore performance in the ’70s that blew the roof off of Carnegie; afterwards, as I raved about it to friends, my date interjected, “Gee, I wish you’d get that excited about me!”

Aimard’s Debussy and Schumann

I was surprised at how much this esteemed pianist went in for washes of color rather than clarity in Debussy’s Preludes, Book II (11/15). A pianist friend didn’t like it at all, and Zachary Woolfe in the Times leaned toward Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Debussy program the week before. The latter not being one of my faves, I didn’t subject myself to his “freedom” of expression, but I did enjoy Aimard’s performances, even if a certain sameness crept in after awhile. (Admission: I think the Book I Preludes are more inspired and individual.) But Aimard’s reticent Schumann, while perhaps hewing to the letter of the score, doesn’t move me, and I think that inserting the five posthumous etudes in the middle of the piece makes it interminable. Play the five independently if you must (but they are still not top-drawer Schumann).

Adès’s Grey Tempest

With all the encomia over this Brit darling of the critics, Thomas Adès, I expected a new operatic masterpiece at its final performance this season (11/17). True to form, local reviewers raved en masse. But, great heavens, what a disappointment: colorless (Shakespeare?), dynamically squashed, melodically tepid. Would that Hurricane Sandy, which struck six days after this operatic tempest’s debut, had packed such a paltry punch! Give me an operatic treatment of MGM’s 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet, based loosely on The Tempest, with Louis and Bebe Barron’s “electronic tonalities” for the music.

Perhaps my esteemed colleagues were taken with the Brittenisms scattered throughout (Midsummer Night’s Dream?). I spoke with one who, when challenged, said he might have gone overboard in his praise because he doesn’t want to discourage new opera at the Met. I’ll try again in the eventual revival and hope to be embarrassed by my comments herein. In the interim, Peter G. Davis’s informative and positive review on this Web site (10/25) may provide more than my visceral reaction.