Musical America Blogs

by Sedgwick Clark

We hear entirely too little of George Crumb’s music in New York. On 4/19 Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra stepped into the breach with crackerjack performances of the American composer’s early Variazioni (1959, but not premiered until 1965) and Star-Child (1977), played with power and sonority, especially by Crumb’s beloved array of exotic percussion. In between came Echoes of Time and the River (Echoes II), Crumb’s 1968 Pulitzer Prize winner and a Botstein favorite.

The first piece—a partly 12-tone work that reveals his student infatuation with Berg’s Lyric Suite and Violin Concerto and Bartók’s MUSPAC, among others, along with clear evidence of the Crumb to come—deserves frequent hearing, as does the more fancifully astronomical Star-Child. The sheer size and virtuosity of the latter’s forces obviously mitigates against performance, but Botstein and the expanded ASO—“including soprano, solo trombone, children’s choir, a male speaking choir that also plays hand-bells, organ, and enlarged sections that include six horns, seven trumpets, and eight percussionists,” writes annotator Robert Carl—were up to Crumb’s demands in the resounding acoustic of Carnegie.

Echoes of Time and the River was more problematic. Crumb requires members of the orchestra to march across the stage and down into the parquet aisles in a precisely executed processional, all the while chanting and, at the end, whistling. In the program booklet, Botstein recalls his undergrad days as assistant conductor and concertmaster of the University of Chicago orchestra in 1967 and observing a rehearsal of the Chicago Symphony premiere of the piece in which the players refused to do the processionals. When Seiji Ozawa led the Boston Symphony in Echoes at Carnegie in February 1976, the players looked mortified. I don’t recall how the BSO audience reacted, but the ASO’s audience laughed. Perhaps some preparatory words from the podium before the downbeat might have helped, but the players lacked any semblance of ritualistic evocativeness in either pace or expression (the women stomped resoundingly across the stage in hard heels). Perhaps a screening of the Shangri-la scenes of Lost Horizon might have provided behavioral insight. But at least the “Procession Coordinator” should have insisted on rubber-soled shoes. As for the musical performance, Echoes required a more sensitive hand than Botstein’s presentational manner.

Shaham in New Jersey

Gil Shaham playing the Berg Violin Concerto and a thoughtful program capped off by one of my favorite Prokofiev symphonies, the Third, enticed me to Newark’s NJPAC on 4/27. New Jersey Symphony’s music director, Jacques Lacombe, puts together interesting repertoire, and the orchestra is a fine one. They will be playing works by Varèse, Weill, and Busoni next week, 5/9, at Carnegie’s Spring for Music. Don’t miss it.

Shaham’s performance of the Berg concerto, unlike those of most virtuoso violinists, actually honored the composer’s muted dynamic scheme. This is a very quiet piece—almost chamber music—and Lacombe was with him all the way. At times one wished for a larger body of strings (playing quietly, of course) to support the pianissimos, but the orchestra’s level of artistry was evident throughout. Shaham also played the world premiere of Richard Danielpour’s Kaddish for Violin and Orchestra, a lovely, affecting expansion for strings and harp of a sextet he composed after his father’s death in 1977. It deserves wide performance.

Prokofiev’s Third Symphony (1929) uses themes from his opera The Fiery Angel. It’s loud, dissonant, aggressive, and the New Jersey performance was too well behaved and underpowered for the optimum effect I’ve heard in concert from Philadelphia/Muti and Chailly with the New York Philharmonic and Concertgebouw. Still, there were many beauties to enjoy in the quiet second movement and serpentine third.

All of Ruggles on CD at Last!

Hard on the heels of Michael Tilson Thomas’s American Mavericks tour with the San Francisco Symphony, MTT’s long unavailable recording of the complete works of Carl Ruggles is on CD at last. American music devotees have the new-music organization Other Minds (www.otherminds.org) to thank for stepping in gloriously where Sony Classical had feared to tread.

I remember Columbia’s mid-seventies press conference to announce its new recording contract with Tilson Thomas. With irrepressible enthusiasm, he announced that his initial projects would be complete cycles of Ruggles and the French composer Pérotin (12th c.-13th c.), whose music has influenced minimalism. Nothing came of the latter, but the Ruggles project was recorded between 1975 and 1978 and released in 1980 to rave reviews. The orchestral works were played by the Buffalo Philharmonic, of which MTT was music director (1971-79) and getting impressive results in concert and on record. Such artists as soprano Judith Blegen, trumpeter Gerard Schwarz, Speculum Musicae, the Gregg Smith Singers, and pianist John Kirkpatrick, a friend and champion of both Ruggles and Ives, were enlisted for the chamber works. It was a class act and is unlikely to be duplicated.

Other Minds has prepared a model reissue. Most importantly, the master source material of original producer Steven Epstein’s recordings frees us at last from listening to the abominably pressed CBS LPs. The handsomely designed CD booklet, adorned with Thomas Hart Benton’s portrait of Ruggles composing at the piano, reprints the LP notes by Tilson Thomas and Kirkpatrick and adds a 1946 essay about Ruggles by Lou Harrison.

No one interested in American music should hesitate to buy this CD set.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

5/3 Metropolitan Opera, 6 p.m. Wagner: Götterdämmerung. Fabio Luisi (cond.). Katarina Dalayman, soprano; Wendy Bryn Harmer, soprano; Karen Cargill, mezzo; Jay Hunter Morris, tenor; Iain Paterson, bass-baritone; Eric Owens, bass-baritone; Hans-Peter König, bass.

5/7 Carnegie Hall, 7:30. “Spring for Music.” Houston Symphony/Hans Graf. Shostakovich: Anti-Formalist Rayok; Symphony No. 11 (“The Year 1905”).

5/9 Carnegie Hall, 7:30. “Spring for Music.” New Jersey Symphony/Jacques Lacombe; Hila Plitmann, soprano; Marc-André Hamelin, piano; Men of the Westminster Symphonic Choir. Varèse: Nocturnal. Weill: Symphony No. 1 (“Berliner Symphony”). Busoni: Piano Concerto.

by Sedgwick Clark

The media were consumed last week by the death at age 82 of Dick Clark (need I say, no relation?). I was never a fan of American Bandstand. I came home from school when I was a tot and twisted to Hollywood on Indianapolis TV’s late-afternoon Frances Farmer Presents instead of Chubby Checker. There, in her world-weary voice, the aging actress introduced the film of the afternoon with anecdotes about the stars. I was too young to appreciate what she had to say, but I recall that her show was interlarded with so many commercials that often I didn’t reach the denouement before my mother called me to dinner. It was many years before I learned who got the girl in Casablanca.

Anyway, while America was mourning, I had less charitable thoughts about Dick Clark. In 1972 the New York Daily News ran a short interview with him saying that classical music would die because no one wanted to listen to it. “What a moron,” I thought, and skewered the piece on the wall of my office at Philips and Mercury Records. For some reason I never forgot that little news piece. It perished in the electrical fire that ignited in the ceiling months later, a little after 6 one evening when I would have been at my desk. Fortunately, I was at dinner with Bernard Haitink that night in Boston, where he was conducting Mahler’s First—else my ashes would have forever commingled with Dick Clark’s thoughtless words.

Van Zweden’s Galvanic Mahler    

And speaking of Mahler’s First, it was the major work led by Musical America’s current Conductor of the Year, Jaap van Zweden, in his New York Philharmonic debut on April 12. Talk about intensity! I don’t recall ever seeing a more tightly wound podium demeanor. He cued every last entrance, and the New Yorkers responded with coiled-spring precision. Interpretively, the Dutch conductor fell somewhere between Bernstein’s emotionalism and Haitink’s objectivity, with dynamism in spades. You can’t lose with Mahler’s Triumphal conclusion—the horns standing suddenly to pour out their golden tone fff—and the audience went predictably wild. What was not predictable was that the orchestra stayed seated, applauding van Zweden as he came out for his first bow—a remarkable gesture of respect from these difficult-to-please musicians. He’ll be back soon, no doubt.

In the first half, he accompanied the volatile 25-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. She kept pushing ahead, but van Zweden and his players kept up respectably. The concluding allegro, beginning with the pizz. strings at 131, was dispatched with a breathless edge-of-seat unanimity that I’ve heard equaled only by the mercurial Martha Argerich, Charles Dutoit, and the Orchestre National de France at Avery Fisher Hall on March 18, 1994—the best performance I’ve ever heard live. Message to Yuja: A bit more poise can yield a more satisfying performance overall.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/26 Metropolitan Opera. Wagner: Das Rheingold. Fabio Luisi (cond.). Wendy Bryn Harmer, soprano; Stephanie Blythe, mezzo; Patricia Bardon, mezzo; Adam Klein, tenor; Gerhard Siegel, tenor; Bryn Terfel, baritone; Eric Owens, bass-baritone; Franz-Josef Selig, bass; Hans-Peter König, bass.

4/27 New Jersey Performing Arts Center (Newark). New Jersey Symphony/Jacques Lacombe; Gil Shaham, violin. Mozart: Masonic Funeral Music. Berg: Violin Concerto. Danielpour: Kaddish for Violin and Orchestra (world premiere). Prokofiev: Symphony No. 3.

4/28 Metropolitan Opera (broadcast). Wagner: Die Walküre. Fabio Luisi (cond.). Katarina Dalayman, soprano; Eva-Maria Westbroek, soprano; Stephanie Blythe, mezzo; Jonas Kaufmann, tenor; Bryn Terfel, baritone; Hans-Peter König, bass.

4/30 Metropolitan Opera. Wagner: Siegfried. Fabio Luisi (cond.). Katarina Dalayman, soprano; Patricia Bardon, mezzo; Jay Hunter Morris, tenor; Gerhard Siegel, tenor, Bryn Terfel, baritone; Eric Owens, bass-baritone.

5/1 Carnegie Hall. Mathias Goerne, baritone; Lief Ove Andsnes, piano. Songs by Shostakovich and Mahler.

5/2 Carnegie Hall. New York Phiharmonic/Alan Gilbert. Mahler: Symphony No. 6 (“Tragic”).

by Sedgwick Clark

I didn’t react favorably to all the works in Michael Tilson Thomas’s American Mavericks series, which has consumed this blog for three weeks. But that’s not the point: This is the kind of programming that keeps our concert halls vital, and the full houses certainly bespoke wide interest, especially among younger listeners. As I write this (4/19), I look forward to a program tonight at Carnegie Hall of George Crumb’s music, courtesy of Leon Botstein and the American Symphony. Among other works, I’ll hear Crumb’s Star-Child, which I haven’t heard live since its premiere in 1977 with Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. Long may these enterprising conductors wave!

Partch, Bates, Del Tredici, Harrison (3/29)

The music of California composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) is genuinely unique, played only on instruments he himself created. My interest has been known to wander in his longer works, but his 17-minute Daphne of the Dunes (1958; rev. 1967) was an aural delight and never outstayed its welcome. I was struck by the similarity of the work’s opening rhythm to the fandango beat in Bernard Herrmann’s title music for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959).

Mason Bates’s “stylistic signature,” writes Thomas May in the program notes, is “the blend of acoustic instrumentalists and/or singers with electronic sounds.” The quarter-hour Mass Transmission, for organ, electronica (the composer’s own moniker for his “palette of digital samplings and techno beats”), and chorus, was composed for this festival. It sets texts by early 20th-century Dutch parents attempting to reach their children in Java via radio and an online blog describing a woman’s impressions of Java. The 35-year-old Bates’s music sounded like ’60s MOR.

At intermission, composer David Del Tredici (b. 1937) upstaged his own music with his personal performance art involving a youngish man, chains, and a silver-spiked dog collar and leash. In his comments prior to conducting DDT’s piece, MTT with tongue in cheek called him “the most maverick composer in the room.” DDT’s 45-year-old 12-tone Syzygy for soprano and 20 instrumentalists sets poems by James Joyce—a far cry from his latter-day neo-Romantic Alice in Wonderland period. It received a committed performance from the not-always-ideally-audible soprano Kiera Duffy and MTT. A few days later, I listened to Richard Dufallo’s 1970s Columbia recording of Syzygy and found it a much more approachable, less dissonant piece. I have no idea which best represents it.

Those colorful percussion instruments had all the fun in Lou Harrison’s Organ Concerto with Percussion Orchestra (1973). I can’t imagine that Paul Jacobs, the fine soloist, enjoyed playing the 1974 Rodgers electro-acoustic organ. For all I know, its desiccated wheeze was the authentic timbre of an organ baking in Java’s salt air, but it certainly wasn’t a balm to the ears. Most interesting to me was Harrison’s borrowing of Varèse’s ambling Ionisation rhythm for the snare drums early in the concerto.

Reich, Monk, Foss, Subotnick (3/30)

Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood (1973) is one of his minimalist, all-percussion works that never fails to send an audience into ecstasy. What a great concert opener!

Meredith Monk (b. 1942) is Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2012, but she is also a singer, keyboardist, dancer, choreographer, director, and film maker. Her Realm Variations, for several San Francisco instrumentalists and her own vocal ensemble, demonstrated that her status as a composer is no less distinguished. It was the most sheerly beautiful piece in the festival, and I look forward to a recording so I can get to know it well.

I heard Lukas Foss (1922-2009) play the piano part of his Echoi (1963) two or three times over the years, and I have his recording on Epic, but it never seemed to run as long as this performance did. He allowed for improvisation in the piece, which I presume accounts for the inflation. The program book lists 24 minutes, but these fine performers took 30:10. Too long.

It pains me to report that I found little to engage me in Jacob’s Room: Monodrama by Morton Subotnick (b. 1930), a composer whose early electronic works for Nonesuch Records I admire greatly. Jacob has undergone many incarnations, including a full-length opera, since 1985. In the new version, music and text for several characters in the opera are now given to a single voice, spoken and sung by the composer’s wife, soprano Joan La Barbara. Electronic manipulation “throws” her voice and what the program bio describes as “her unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques—multiphonics, circular breathing, ululation, and glottal clicks” around the auditorium in a manner that I found distracting to such a serious subject, which the composer explains thusly: “The basic notion of Jacob’s Room is that holocausts are not just local catastrophes; they also gradually destroy the thin fabric we have of being human. They deprive us of the artifacts we have created and our empathy as a group. When these things fall apart, we find ourselves alone in the universe.” Simplicity was called for.

Looking forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/23 Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space. Cutting Edge Concerts/Victoria Bond, conductor and host. Theodore Wiprud: My Last Duchess (world premiere). Robert Sirota: The Clever Mistress (New York premiere). Fully staged one-act operas.

by Sedgwick Clark

I really should be working on my taxes . . . .

Cage, Cowell, Adams, Varèse

The first concert to involve San Francisco musicians in the series, on Tuesday in Carnegie Hall, began with the most anticipated event of the series: Cage’s whimsical 1970 Song Books, with Jessye Norman, Meredith Monk, and Joan La Barbara the unlikely trio of vocalists, and Tilson Thomas miming various actions. Cage provides nearly a hundred numbers to be executed, organized by the performers. MTT chose a half-hour selection for this occasion. Frankly, the So Percussion concert LINK the previous evening provided far more fun in Dan Deacon’s less pretentious Cage knockoff, Take a Deep Breath.

Cage said that Henry Cowell, whose Synchrony (1930) followed, was “the open sesame of new music in America.” Maybe. But except for an all-Cowell concert LINK by the American Symphony under Leon Botstein at Lincoln Center two years ago, performances of his some 1,000 pieces have been few and far between since his death. For all his purported innovations–the most influential being “tone clusters,” in which the piano keys are struck with the fist or forearm–all the works I’ve heard seem to exist more as showcases for inventiveness than cogently structured music. Still, the nearly 14-minute Synchrony begins with a gorgeous three-minute trumpet solo (beautifully played by SF’s Mark Inouye) and contains lovely moments until its abrupt ending.

A lot of people I respect venerate John Adams’s music. His Absolute Jest was composed for this Mavericks tour. It’s a sweet, inoffensive piece inspired by (in the composer’s words) “the ecstatic energy of Beethoven, who was the master of taking the minimal amount of information and turning it into fantastic, expressive, and energized structures.” The problem with such an homage is, once Absolute Jest ended, all I could remember was Ludwig van’s Ninth Symphony scherzo and the opening movement of the Op. 131 string quartet. When a Stravinsky—whom Adams often evokes rhythmically—throws in a skittish reference to Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia in Jeu de cartes or an elephantine rendition of Schubert’s Marche Militaire in Circus Polka, it couldn’t be anyone but Stravinsky. The well-received performance was undoubtedly a composer’s dream.

When influences from Stravinsky’s early ballets seep into Edgard Varèse’s Amériques (ca. 1918-21; rev. 1927), one smiles knowingly but can’t possibly escape the gruff French-American composer’s path-breakingly percussive voice. Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic performed Varèse’s complete works LINK on two roof-raising Lincoln Center Festival concerts two summers ago. Gilbert’s Philharmonic predecessors Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and Lorin Maazel also played Varèse’s music—Boulez most distinguished of all—but I don’t recall any Varèse at Carnegie since the stupendous Philly/Muti Arcana in 1985 and Cleveland/Dohnányi Amériques in 1989. Enter Michael Tilson Thomas and his virtuoso San Franciscans, who shook the rafters with a smashing, superbly played Amériques. Now Arcana, please?

Ruggles, Feldman, Ives Orchestrated

Tilson Thomas has been the master interpreter of Carl Ruggles’s Sun-Treader (1926-31) since performing and recording it in 1970 with the Boston Symphony. His Carnegie Hall performance at that time was the New York premiere. His complete recording of Ruggles’s music later that decade for CBS with the Buffalo Philharmonic and various soloists was recently released on CD for the first time on the Other Minds label. It only amounts to 80 minutes of music, of which the ca. 16-minute Sun-Treader is best known. At the Wednesday concert, the San Franciscans seemed a bit more refined than either of the recordings but without ever compromising this granite-hewn score. More Ruggles, Michael?

I know I should “get” Morton Feldman’s whisper-quiet notes and silences in Piano and Orchestra (1975). I read in James M. Keller’s astute notes of Feldman’s aesthetic alignment to the painters of the New York School. A friend explains how carefully the harmonics and pauses are composed, but I’m still left as cold as a white Rothko canvas. I’ll keep trying, but Feldman performances don’t come around often. There is no doubt, however, of the commitment and artistry of pianist Emanuel Ax, whose forays into 20th-century and contemporary music are admirable, the conductor, and the San Francisco musicians.

Charles Ives composed his “Concord” Sonata between 1916 and 1919; then he obsessively revised it until 1947. That’s 31 years. The even more obsessive American maverick, Henry Brant, took five years longer to orchestrate it (1958-1994), calling it A Concord Symphony. From the very opening the orchestral garb bears a strong resemblance to Sun-Treader’s dissonant palette, which makes sense because Ives and Ruggles were friends and knew each other’s music well. The San Francisco team’s recording of the Brant orchestration was released earlier in the year on the orchestra’s own (and very successful) label. Needless to say, it’s a “must” for all Ives fans—what the record companies used to call “a sonic spectacular.” But the live experience struck me as even more stunning, revealing overtones in the woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings that perhaps only Carnegie’s fabled acoustic can offer. Ives and Ives/Brant provide a fascinating comparison, and I strongly recommend listening to the “Concord” Sonata recordings by Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Teldec) and Jeremy Denk (Think Denk Media).

Tax Deadlines Wait for No Munsonian  

Tune in next week for my pithy words on the last two Mavericks concerts.

Looking Forward

My week’s scheduled concerts:

4/12 Avery Fisher Hall. New York Philharmonic/Jaap van Zweden; Yuja Wang, piano. Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3. Mahler: Symphony No. 1.

by Sedgwick Clark

The American composer has no greater champion than Michael Tilson Thomas. For his first season as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, 1995-96, virtually every subscription program contained an American work. Heralding the 21st century, the orchestra’s 1999-2000 season concluded with a three-week American Mavericks festival. This year, to celebrate the orchestra’s centennial, Tilson Thomas revived the Mavericks concept and took it on tour, culminating in a week at Carnegie Hall. Darned if these concerts weren’t the hottest tickets in town, with hardly an empty seat in either house.

Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed called Tilson Thomas “a fearless musical explorer” when Musical America named him Conductor of the Year in 1995. Perhaps the most notorious of his explorations remains a performance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs at a Boston Symphony concert at Carnegie Hall on January 19, 1973. This rather severe example of minimalism–in which four organs “deconstruct” a dominant eleventh chord for 20 minutes to the rhythmic underpinning of a monotonous maraca beat (Steve’s Bolero?)–provoked a mass walkout, with audience members shouting at each other and at the performers.

Tilson Thomas recalled that “One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing ‘Stop, stop, I confess.’ ” Another quote had her banging a shoe. I wonder how he could have heard her: I was sitting about a third of the way back from the stage in the left parquet section with Joan La Barbara, who performed in two of these current Maverick concerts, and can attest that after 10 minutes it was impossible to hear the music over the uproar.

But I digress. As noted in this space a couple of weeks ago, I had looked forward to these concerts ever since their announcement, and overall there were few disappointments. The four San Francisco concerts were preceded by a week of city-wide concert, dance, film, and visual arts events, performed by violinist Jennifer Koh and pianist Reiko Uchida, Alarm Will Sound/Alan Pierson, and JACK Quartet, among others.

A hugely entertaining John Cage Centennial Celebration by So Percussion and friends performing on assorted electronics at Zankel Hall (3/26) led off the first night of American Mavericks. The group writes in the program book about their concert: “John Cage believed that duration—as the only musical parameter that sound and silence have in common—was the best way to frame musical structure. It becomes like a box, or a series of compartments, into which all kinds of noisy, unusual, and beautiful things can be thrown. In this spirit, our show will be exactly 91 minutes long (4’33” multiplied by 20), a Cage-ian work unto itself.”

Seven Cage pieces (four performed simultaneously) were thus woven in with five new works by other composers to create a continuous tapestry.  The digital countdown was projected onto the stage wall so that all of the pieces and actions could be “choreographed” with precision. Isolated events dotted Zankel’s crowded stage: One man performed pushups; another who had been growing a long, black beard for over a year in anticipation of this concert cut it off. A member of So Percussion ripped through Cage’s 45’ for a Speaker (“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it”), astonishingly pronouncing the final word as the countdown reached 00:00.

Audience participation was delightfully provided by Dan Deacon in his Take a Deep Breath, which consisted of 14 instructions timed to the countdown and performed by everyone in the hall “to the utmost extreme” and “with sincerity.” Among them, hold one’s breath as long as possible and release it with “AHH” or “OHH” sounds; make non-singing, vocal, or speech sounds with your mouth, including “tongue slaps, lip smacks, pops, teeth chatter, clicks, sucking sounds, sound with the spit in your mouth, whistles, fart sounds, throat sounds, etc.”; make a series of snaps, claps, stomps, whistles, or hoots in accelerating-decelerating, crescendo-decrescendo shape; sing something to the person on your left for a minute; play any song on your cell phone at maximum volume; switch seats).

As my favorite concert companion had been scared away by my description of the evening’s projected delights, I found myself unable to respond fully to the composer’s urging, “Don’t be shy!” At some point in the work I realized that the best “performers” would be couples in love. 

NOTE: Tune in next Wednesday for Part 2, which covers the San Francisco Symphony portion of the American Mavericks festival.

by Sedgwick Clark

Rattle/Berlin’s Bruckner and Mahler

People used to equate Bruckner and Mahler (their music is both long and loud, after all). And those who heard Simon Rattle lead the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in Bruckner’s Ninth (2/24) and Mahler’s “Resurrection” (2/25) symphonies in such close proximity should have been able to tell the differences at once. Overall, tempos were well chosen and Rattle eschewed the confounding manipulation of pace and phrase that has marred much of his work in the standard repertoire.

Indeed, the Bruckner was one of the finest performances I’ve heard of the symphony in recent years. Rattle’s firm focus on the long line and pacing of climaxes was unerring, and unlike many conductors he never shortchanged the composer’s pauses or sustained whole notes. Even if Bruckner’s innig indications—“intimate,” “heartfelt”—and traditional spirituality seemed a bit underplayed, Rattle’s interpretive mastery was mightily impressive.

The evening’s importance was further marked by the U.S. premiere of a “performance version by Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca, 1983-2011” of the symphony’s projected fourth movement, left unfinished at Bruckner’s death in 1896. The 1903 premiere of the Ninth claimed it to be emotionally sufficient in three movements. Wrong, maintains John Phillips in the program booklet: “Bruckner left the movement very largely complete.” Some pages were missing, he admits, “But in most all cases, Bruckner’s preliminary sketches enabled us to reconstruct an accurate picture of the musical continuity, and the fully orchestrated sections showed clearly how Bruckner intended it to sound.”

“Intended” is the key word. One can acknowledge and study the achievement but still realize that melodically the material is eminently forgettable, mediocre, not up to anything in the sublime first three movements. Quite unlike Mahler’s inspiration in his unfinished Tenth—so brilliantly revealed by Deryck Cooke’s “performing version”—this movement detracts from the first three. All serious Brucknerites will have to acquire Rattle’s recording of the four-movement Ninth when EMI releases it in May, but I’ll bet most listeners will opt out of the finale after a single hearing.

Rattle’s Mahler Second (“Resurrection”) was a disappointment from its mushy opening attacks to the inaudibility of the tam-tam and organ on the final page. Those who know his recording will not be surprised with his tempos, and except for a couple of hasty accelerandos I found them unobjectionable. I especially liked his lilting second-movement Andante moderato (Bernstein’s least successful movement). But some of his choices—the first movement’s huge climax at the end of the second development and his adherence to the score’s wrong-headed Tempo 1indication at movement’s end (and he is by no means alone in these instances)—were ponderous and unintuitive. The offstage horns in the finale were placed outside the balcony but could have sounded even farther away. My Carnegie touchstones for this effect are the Indianapolis Symphony’s “Resurrection” under John Nelson and Julius Rudel’s Buffalo Philharmonic performance of Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied—both in 1980—in which the offstage instruments in the latter sounded as if they were playing full tilt from the middle of Central Park. Stupendous! But Rattle gave full power to the gigantic crescendo in the finale, and the offstage-right brass episode was well balanced and quite exciting.

The Times’s Anthony Tommasini wrote in his review of the first of the orchestra’s three concerts that “it is fascinating how even with so many new and younger members, the character of the orchestra remains.” Sorry, sitting in Row T across from Tony in the parquet, I don’t hear it. Few of the instrumentalists appear old enough to have played under Karajan. Their sound under Rattle, to my ears, is powerful yet coarse in texture and opaque in tuttis, with little of the sensuous beauty and rich, organ-like sonority cultured by the elder maestro. And the purely technical quality of the BPO’s playing appeared at least partially dependent upon which of the three First Concertmasters was playing. In retrospect, the Bruckner’s excellent performance seemed in large part due to Daishin Kashimoto’s attentive cues, whereas the schlamperei of the ensemble in the Mahler seemed mirrored in Daniel Stabrawa’s less-heedful demeanor.

Maazel Mauls Sibelius

The young Lorin Maazel recorded a Sibelius symphony cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic for Decca between 1963 and ’68, and the septuagenarian Maazel’s Carnegie Hall concert with the VPO on March 2 might have been seen by the hopeful as a return to the best of those efforts: Nos. 3, 4, and 6. No such luck. Played at this concert were Nos. 1, 5, and 7, and the performances were bloated (7 and 5 each gaining more than five minutes over the recordings, to no end save tedium), spottily played (5 and 1), and littered with Maazelisms (most pronounced in the first movement of 1 and the exaggerated though precisely played distention of the final six chords of 5). Coming after his spectacular traversal of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony with the New York Phil last October, a distinct disappointment.

Honeck’s Tchaik 5 Sears the Ears

Two years ago, the Pittsburgh Symphony under Music Director Manfred Honeck sounded in Mahler’s First as if every instrument had its separate microphone. I vowed never to attend another concert by him, but I was in town for Rattle and Berlin and my legendary sense of fairness won out. On Sunday afternoon (2/26) in Avery Fisher Hall the Pittsburgh sonority was far more unified. The New York premiere of Steven Stucky’s17-minute celebration of Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, seemed a hit with both audience and players. While all the water clichés of the past appeared unavoidable (my ears were boating in Giverny, but Allan Kozinn in the Times heard Jackson Pollack as a “visual analogue”), Stucky’s tonal idiom and masterful orchestration were a balm to the senses. Honeck and the PSO were flypaper accompanists to Hilary Hahn’s dietetic Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1.  If heartless Tchaikovsky is your preference, Honeck’s awesomely drilled Fifth Symphony after intermission filled the bill. The whiplash tempos, wide dynamics, and slashing attacks were undeniably impressive, but one felt brutalized. Moreover, his flashy conducting style actually encouraged the audience to applaud prematurely in the dramatic pause before the finale’s coda. Not even the encore, Khachaturian’s already-virtuosic Galop from Masquerade, escaped Honeck’s teeth-grinding excess. The audience went wild.

Don’t Miss St. Louis

Alas, I can’t get to everything. I’ll be out of town on Saturday (3/10) when David Robertson leads his St. Louis Symphony in a fabulous program of Debussy’s early Printemps, Kaija Saariaho’s shimmering Quatre Instants, sung by Karita Mattila, and Stravinsky’s complete Firebird ballet. (By the way, all of these musicians were Musical America awardees: Conductor, Composer, Musician, and Musician, respectively.)