Prom 32 this week featured Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Mahler 1, and Dutilleux’s The Shadows of Time (one of his last works). The concert is still accessible to hear online for a few more days here.
Meanwhile, Daniel Stephen Johnson reports on the Seattle Symphony’s latest addition to its acclaimed Dutilleux series under conductor Ludovic Morlot:
While the orchestral playing is as ravishing as listeners have come to expect from Morlot and Seattle, the soloists brought in from outside the band are among the very hottest players on their respective instruments. The playing of violinist Augustin Hadelich, fresh from his Grammy win for last year’s entry in this Dutilleux cycle, is as intensely expressive in Sur le même accord as it is precise, while harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani executes Les citations with his characteristic wit and panache, and the cimbalom playing of percussionist Chester Englander lends an unexpected delight to Mystère de l’instant.
And my own recent profile of Hadelich for Strings Magazine is available here. September’s Gramophone will have my story on the Seattle Symphony and Dutilleux.
My preview of Seattle Symphony’s upcoming festival of American music, from Charles Ives to Julia Wolfe and John Luther Adams:
“There are as many sides to American music as there are to the American people,” Leonard Bernstein remarked in one of his popular Young People’s Concerts devoted to the topic “What Is American Music?”
“Maybe that’s the main quality of all — our many-sidedness. Think of all the races and personalities from all over the globe that make up our country. We’ve taken it all in,” he said.
Bernstein broadcast that message almost six decades ago in 1958. Since then the musical landscape has become vastly more diverse, many-sided and multi-layered. The old-fashioned image of the melting pot seems quaint compared to the dazzling, complex intersections and border crossings that make today’s musical scene so vibrant and self-aware.
June 13, 2016 • 7:31 amComments Off on Fascinating Rhythms: New Music from Anna Clyne and Classics by Gershwin and Beethoven Make a Stimulating Mix at the Seattle Symphony
Not even half over, 2016 has been an unusually painful year, not least for the losses we’ve sustained in the arts. Yet the Seattle Symphony’s final program of the subscription season conveyed abundant reason for optimism, at least as far as the creative spirit goes.
Dutilleux City: Thanks to the vision and musicianship of Ludovic Morlot and Seattle Symphony, the Emerald City can legitimately claim to have become one of the globe’s top spots to hear authoritative performances of the French master.
This weekend’s program includes a not-to-be-missed chance to enjoy Dutilleux’s Timbres, espace, mouvement, which is being recordedfor release as part of the third volume in the SSO’s ongoing survey of his orchestral music on the house label. (Vol. 2, featuring soloist Augustin Hadelich, garnered the orchestra a Grammy in February.)
But nothing compares with the experience of this music in live performance. By now it’s a built-in expectation that Morlot and the SSO will sustain an almost superhuman focus when bringing a Dutilleux score to life — with the result that, to borrow Schoenberg’s famous encomium (re his student Anton Webern’s music): “every glance is a poem, every sigh a novel.”
It’s been fascinating to watch Morlot, over his now half-decade with the ensemble, inspiring the players to the level of poetic accuracy, of fluent command of an incalculably subtle idiom, such as was on display in last night’s performance. Even by Dutilleux’s standards, Timbres, espace, mouvement, ou “La nuit etoilée” (from 1978, with a section added in 1991) pushes the bar still higher.
Morlot gave a brief intro to the piece, accompanied by relevant visuals to contextualize some of the composer’s extra-musical inspirations: the constellations, a gorgeous interstellar nebula, and van Gogh’s famous painting cited in Dutilleux’s alternate title (“Starry Night”).
The music director explained that the last-named is reflected in the unusual scoring for a large orchestra, which however omits violins and violas: their lack focuses the registral weight at a lower band to evoke the nocturnal mystery especially at the bottom portion of van Gogh’s canvas.
The early Romantics had their “blue flower.” Dutilleux has his “blue flame,” as Morlot memorably characterizes the composer’s sound world, contrasting its unique incandescence with the more obvious brilliance of a yellow flame: “music that evaporates” before our ears, but not before kindling an extraordinary intensity.
None of this is “program music” in the old-fashioned sense — a soundtrack to the Big Bang, or an attempt to “illustrate” van Gogh’s painting. (Why would a masterpiece painting need to be illustrated anyway?)
A better way to think of the piece — which was certainly encouraged by this performance — is in terms of what the first part of the title itself indicates: timbres that move about in musical space, the mystery of sonorities as they begin to coalesce and cluster across the orchestral field.
A critical element here is the timing — not just what’s written in the score, but the unquantitatable rightness of overall pacing, of relation of part to whole, of the transition between ideas that should emerge in performance. Morlot tapped into and sustained the necessary sense of cosmic awe and mystery: source of our very capacity to experience beauty.
Especially captivating were the echoings of the long, sinuous melody that shoots across the orchestral canvas, as juxtaposed so effectively with Dutilleux’s watchmaker-precision scoring for his percussion section. (Terrific work from the woodwinds in particular, with a key role for Mary Lynch’s superb stylings on oboe.)
The piece’s spare but powerful climaxes aren’t narrative “events” or outcomes but announce sudden shifts of perspective, a kind of turning of the cosmic wheel. I also admired how Morlot countered the receding horizon of Dutilleux’s most amorphous gestures with a sense of finality in the score’s massive unisons.
How this composer achieved such rending beauty remains one of the mysteries of contemporary music — not the sort of beauty that washes lazily over a passive listener, but a co-creative beauty of imagination, requiring incarnation in sound…
The ensuing Beethoven — the Fourth Piano Concerto — marked a continuation of the SSO’s ongoing two-year cycle devoted to Herr Ludwig van. As usual with these strong contrasts, I couldn’t help but hear a few “foretastes” of those mesmerizing sinuosities from the Dutilleux in a few of Beethoven’s woodwind phrasings in the first movement, though I’m willing to concede that this might have resulted from some sort of psychoacoustic aftereffect.
Unfortunately, I have to report my deep disappointment in the contributions of the soloist, Imogen Cooper. The British pianist commands a formidable reputation on the international circuit — in particular for this repertoire — which is why I was all the more baffled by this experience.
Cooper’s point of attack and phrasing of the all-important opening solo immediately signaled the basic problem that, to this taste, bedeviled her account throughout. It was clear, clean … and bereft of poetry, personality, or point of view.
Despite Morlot’s efforts to tease out character from the orchestra’s interactions, the whole first movement came across as flaccid, too relaxed — mostly because the points of tension needed to anchor Beethoven’s serenely lyrical writing kept going slack in Cooper’s performance. Even that initial cleanness was offset at several points by notably strong left-hand attacks; but rather than suggest a particular reading, they simply made for an eccentric (and, frankly, off-putting) mannerism.
The middle movement accentuated the problem even more. Morlot whipped up the drama with sternly accentuated string recitative — the “wild beasts” to be tamed by Orpheus/the pianist, in the popular reading of this movement (which also anticipates the strategy of the Ninth’s finale.) Of this Andante Tchaikovsky wrote: “I know of no greater work of genius … and I always pale and chill when I hear it.”
But Cooper’s timid phrasings hardly initiated a dialectic, adhering instead to the same over-relaxed sonority at each entrance. Problems with coordination between Cooper and the ensemble recurred in the outer movements.
Morlot closed the program with the rarely heard final symphony by Prokofiev, the Seventh. Written near the very end of the Russian composer’s life, this is an enigmatic symphonic swan song: the big, sweeping, “Socialist Realist” rhetoric of Romeo and Juliet comes face to face with sonic images of innocence and childhood, of clocks winding down. It’s immensely accessible — and emotionally attractive, in the SSO’s rich-bodied but finely detailed performance — yet somehow riddling all the same.
Morlot played up the perplexing shifts in direction that accentuate the piece — especially in the curious second movement and in the final pages of the finale — as if to underscore the question marks that remain beneath the surface of such “simple” music.
The countdown to Shakespeare400 continues. Here’s my look ahead at this week’s Shakespeare-themed program from Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot, with guest artist Mark Padmore:
If music be the food of love, centuries of composers have failed to surfeit the appetite of our collective passion for Shakespeare.
This week’s Seattle Symphony concerts bring the U.S. premiere of Valentin Silvestrov’s Symphony No. 8, a work in six movements. The world premiere took place last year, on 25 May 2015, in the composer’s native Kiev. Mikhail Tatarnikov (Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Mikhailovsky Theater in St Petersburg) will guest conduct.
Last night’s Seattle Symphony concert featured two guest artists of genuine distinction: Jesús López-Cobos, Conductor Emeritus of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and former music director of Madrid’s Teatro Real, and the violinist Augustin Hadelich.
The latter is especially familiar to Seattle audiences as a longtime regular at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival. This time he returned with a fresh crowning of laurels from last month’s Grammy Awards: he won Best Classical Instrumental Soloist for his recording of L’Arbre des Songes, a violin concerto by Henri Dutilleux. (So fresh, in fact, that, as Hadelich later mentioned, he still hasn’t received the gold-plated trophy he accepted in absentia.)
Hadelich recorded the Dutilleux with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot on their new in-house label, and the SSO and audience welcomed him back with obvious warmth, cheering before he’d played a note. (A couple days before, Hadelich had recorded a shorter Dutilleux piece for violin and orchestra — Sur le même accord — which is due for future release on the SSO label.)
But from the moment he did start playing — the vehicle was Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto — Hadelich cast an absolutely irresistible spell. I kept trying to dissect his secret. There’s no shortage of flawlessly virtuosic young violinists, and being able to showcase your technique on the KiesewetterStrad from 1723 doesn’t hurt.
Still, what made his performance unique was its authenticity. I mean that not in the sense of HIP, of period instrument ideology, but quite simply as a matter of musical and emotional honesty. Too often technique and sincerity (“playing from the heart”) are set up as opposite poles; operating from a stance of modesty, Hadelich grounds his technique — and it’s jaw-dropping fabulous, above all his masterful intonation and dynamics — with sheer love of the musical message.
In the process Hadelich succeeded in dusting away the clichés, phony sentimentality, and sense of routine that frequently accompany the Tchaik. He kept his distance from the lapel-grabbing emotional sensationalism performers know guarantees excitement, but by the same token there was nothing cool or unduly “objective” here.
Overall Hadelich seemed to have in mind Tchaikovsky’s abiding affection for Mozart — always a tempering influence on his own tendencies toward excess. The violinist shaped the first movement’s main theme with a tasteful classicism. When deep pathos emerged, in the minor-key Canzonetta, it resonated powerfully.
Hadelich’s interactions with the players underscored his intense engagement in this music as a present-tense affair. I’d forgotten how beguiling Tchaikovsky’s woodwind lines are here. The clarinet — featuring the expressive work of guest player Gabriel Campos-Zamora — becomes virtually a second protagonist.
Throughout, López-Cobos was interpretively in sync with Hadelich, encouraging clarity of shape and timbre from the players. He set a leisurely pace in the first movement but was able almost imperceptibly to quicken and then moderate it again, in accord with Hadelich’s phrasing choices. The finale was thrillingly breakneck, a rousing conclusion to a work in which Tchaikovsky seems to regain purpose and joie de vivre.
Hadelich returned for an encore: the Andante from J.S. Bach’s Second Solo Sonata in A minor. It was the epitome of this artist’s gift for fusing marvelous technique with incandescent expression: an early-21st-century version of what used to be called “the sublime.”
There was likewise a great deal to admire in Jesús López-Cobos’ work from the podium in this all-Russian program. It seemed to be connected by a “travel” theme (remember that Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto soon after his disastrous attempt at marriage while he was sojourning in Western Europe). As an opener, the Spanish conductor led a charming account of Glinka’s Summer Night in Madrid, rhythmically vivid and awash in cheerful colors.
It turned out to be a pretty accurate trailer for the characteristics he brought to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade in the second half. Particularly in the wake of John Adams’s new masterpiece, Scheherazade.2, last week — I admit to approaching another encounter with Rimsky’s crafty Sultana with some skepticism. It bored me the last time I heard the SSO play this score (three years ago).
This time, I couldn’t get enough of it. López-Cobos coaxed a uniformly high-quality performance from the SSO. Magisterial and majestic, he crafted a beautifully proportionate interpretation of Rimsky’s score, giving just the right amount of time and emphasis to its components.
So rewarding were the musical allurements that he tempted the audience to forget about the half-hearted Arabian Nights program, for which the composer in any case expressed ambivalence. The narrative that mattered was how one texture and melodic idea gave way to the next. Threading this story together was the impressively phrased, gorgeous playing from Elisa Barston, the evening’s concertmaster.
John Adams with the Seattle Symphony (photo credit: Chris Bennion)
Here’s my Seattle Times review of last night’s Seattle Symphony concert with John Adams at the podium:
The chance to hear a great living composer conducting his own music is rarity enough. But the new work John Adams has brought with him is rarer still: a composition created in the here-and-now that shows every sign of becoming part of the canon.
John Adams with the Seattle Symphony (photo credit: Chris Bennion)
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 