Brilliant, Distinctively Dark Discoveries and an Old Favorite with the MSM Symphony Orchestra

Last night at Manhattan School of Music, guest conductor Leonard Slatkin returned to lead the MSM Symphony Orchestra through a program with pervasive if sometimes allusively dark and phantasmagorical overtones: without a doubt, music that resounds in the here and now.

They opened with Cindy McTee‘s Timepiece for Percussion, and String Orchestra. The orchestra quickly danced their way into its proto-Bernard Herrmann motives, alternately playful and menacing, interspersed with moments of sleekness. Quickly, the orchestra rose toward a furtive rhythm, to a tensely pulsing clave with portenous answers between inquiring brass and cynical strings, and flourishes that echoed the evening’s centerpiece, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It was a delightfully cinematic, apt curtain-raiser.

Frank Martin’s Concerto for 7 Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion, and String Orchestra made a good segue. Similarly, Slatkin led the orchestra briskly into a balletesque, allusively chromatic swing with a vivid, broodingly inquiring Nicholas Fitch bassoon solo at the center of the allegro opening movement. From there, Hajin Kil’s searching oboe led them down from a moment of suspicious pageantry to more austere territory.

The second movement began as somber ballet, eerie close harmonies in a balletesque tiptoeing rhythm before the brass kicked in, cynically. Strings and brass developed a quasi-flamenco-tinged forward drive, down to a suspensefully tiptoeing Scheherzada lull punctuated by an even more wary Cameron Pollard horn solo.

The third movement gave way to insistent, tense riffing around the central flamenco theme, the horns answering from around the hall with an equal tension. Timpanist Zachary Masri’s coolly striding solo launched a steady, ineluctably marching crescendo spiced with high woodwind flourishes, toward a coda that offered an unexpected triumph. Kudos to the MSM faculty for resurrecting this.

Their take on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring turned out to be more of a controlled demolition than feral folk explosion after a long Russian winter. The initial calls were muted and enigmatic within an ambience that was absolutely pillowy. Likewise, Slatkin kept the orchestra on a tight leash, with meticulously puffing accents in contrast to spritely wind cadenzas. Was he setting the bar on the quiet side for the sake of enhancing future pyrotechnics? Uh, maybe.

The group took an unexpectedly dusty and then light-fingered, swinging rise to a cyclotron swirl, with more blue-flame simmer than fullscale conflagration on all sides. A teasing lull with precisely choreographed flutes drew a heavy duty truck crush from the percusssion and low brass. Yet the call-and-response after that gave way to a strikingly smooth swing – making the gnashing monsterwalk and danse macabre afterward all the more effective for its relative calm.

Slatkin led with a woundedly plush pulse from there to a mere whisper before the spirits began flitting up into the picture on the wings of the flutes again. The iconic unleashed-maidens theme seemed more stage-managed, less pagan than other orchestras have played it in the last few years, maybe due to the demands of training. Or maybe Slatkin had something new to tell us about this piece, from the misterioso slink on the way through a stabbing, stiletto coda.

There are plenty of upcoming public performances at Manhattan School of Music this month. One intriguing program features their choral ensemble singing works by women composers including Meredith Monk, Melissa Dunphy, Ysaÿe Barnwell, and Tammy Huynh on April 19 at 8 PM at the Ades Performance Space at 130 Claremont Ave. The concert is free; take the 1 to 125th St. and walk back uphill.

Leonard Slatkin Leads a Shattering, Careening MSM Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich Performance

Back at Manhattan School of Music last night for their Symphony Orchestra’s performance of George Walker’s Lyric for Strings and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Student orchestras are like minor league ballclubs: champions one year, basement-dwellers the next as the stars graduate to the majors. From an audience perspective, you take your chances.

Here, guest conductor Leonard Slatkin went for a very precise interpretation of Walker’s brief, melancholy overture. A steady syncopation through circling motives reached a stern coda and then fell away abruptly. You could call it a more vigorous update on the Barber Adagio.

Five minutes in and it was clear that this class was playing for an honors grade.

There was a visceral electricity in the auditorium prior to the performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. This one was his response to the Soviet censors who couldn’t wrap their simple minds around his increasingly sophisticated sound world and wanted to silo him into a style they could make sense of – and, in a primitive 1937 style, surveil. It almost worked.

Classical music in Russia being an enduring pop culture phenomenon, the public’s enthusiastic reaction to the symphony probably saved the composer’s life at a time when Stalin was murdering his colleagues.

Slatkin – who looked none the worse for the physical problems that had sidelined him for a time with the Detroit Symphony – led the ensemble into the first movement tentatively, to a sad, windswept milieu, tiptoeing to sudden swells. Student orchestras seldom negotiate dynamics like this so subtly, with wary winds, harrowingly icy strings and spare brass. It was interesting to watch how even here, Slatkin was restless and wanting to cut loose, but didn’t. at least until his pianist signaled a warning and then they went into battle on a tight leash.

The venomous sarcasm of the march that followed only benefited from the group’s haphazard stumble into it, then the increasing horror as they sealed the counterpoint, through the series of bellicose crescendos that followed. Nikolas Rodriguez’s evocatively searching flute – leitmotif for the millions murdered by the communists – gave way to Naoko Nakajima’s plaintive violin to close out the first movement.

The danse macabre that opened the second had a deliciously understated but withering sarcasm, the orchestra nailing Slatkin’s stark contrasts between lush brass and icepick strings, There was more wounded bitterness than depleted horror as the third movement unwound, from tentative to determined and beaten down but bent on revenge. In 1937, the Russians wanted a reprieve from the Soviet regime; in 2023, the world wants reparations from the oligarchs, the Wall Street geeks and the Silicon Valley velvet mafia who engineered the plandemic.

The level of detail downward from there, flickering and fluttering, was meticulous and cinematic to the nth degree, evoking empty storefronts and desolate graves…and eventually a grim resistance. The reflective, shivery, low string-fueled crescendo brought to mind Ravel, but also Shostakovich’s even more haunted later works. Harpist Isabel Cardenes chose her spots in this grim spotlight with a delicate but weighty intensity.

Before the concert, Slatkin expounded at length at how different conductors had tackled the conclusion, and quickly answered that question with a defiant, brisk pace that pushed the orchestra to a ragged limit. But the effect paid off, driving home Shostakovich’s satire of Stalinesque pageantry. The lull after the opening martial bombast was all the more impactful for the nuanced, grimly dancing interplay between strings, winds and brass. From there, the aching, haunting, rootsy Russian theme and variations rose to something of a compromise, a semi-concealed raised middle finger to authoritarianism. The audience exploded seconds later.

There are a ton of unrestricted public concerts at Manhattan School of Music (the students reciprocate for an appreciative audience). The next are a series of concerto performances on Feb 13 and 14. And for lucky Detroiters, Slatkin is leading the DSO in a performance of Tschaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s Glasslands, and this Shostakovich symphony on Feb 18-19. You can get in for $25.

CD Review: Denis Matsuev/Valery Gergiev/Mariinsky Orchestra – Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No.3./Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

The elephant in the room is that with such a glut of Rachmaninov available on both mp3 and vinyl, did it make any sense to make this recording at all? Answer: a resounding, fortissississimo YES. Everyone who’s a fan of this stuff has his or her favorite versions. Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony did a wonderfully rousing recording of the Piano Concerto No. 3 with Abbey Simon on piano; for sheer velvet sonics, nothing beats the version of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini that Philippe Entremont did with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra roughly a half-century ago. Both of those achieved broad circulation and are commonly available wherever used vinyl is sold (you wouldn’t really settle for icky mp3s, would you?). So why bother with the new recording by pianist Denis Matsuev with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra? Because it’s just as good as those two if not better. And for what it’s worth, it’s also one-stop shopping, two classics for the price of one without the extraneous filler that sometimes gets squeezed into classical albums.

Maybe Russian pride has something to do with this, but whatever the reason, this recording has every bit as much precision as Slatkin’s and gives Ormandy a run for his money as far as lushness is concerned (James Mallinson’s production is noteworthy not only for very closely replicating the warmth of a vinyl record, but also for capturing the ambience of the concert hall – put your headphones on and you are there). And Matsuev’s interpretation is spot-on, coupling a strong yet fluid legato to the kind of percussive power that you need in order to drive all those ferocious crescendos home, replete with longing, angst and rage and not a hint of the cold, clinical precision that plagued so many Soviet recordings of this material. As far as that’s concerned, there’s plenty of dynamics but there’s nothing particularly subtle in either of these pieces, Rachmaninov veering between his usual white-knuckle intensity and perhaps the sonic equivalent of a too-strong handshake: not for everyone, maybe, but you can’t say it doesn’t grab you. Pianist and orchestra wrest a vivid downward trajectory into the sweepingly beautiful second movement of the concerto from the battlefield that opens it, and interestingly, they accentuate many of the pauses that demarcate the twenty-eight cinematic variations of the Paganini theme. It works both to smooth the transitions between them and maybe even to underscore what Rachmaninov might have had in mind, a series of foreboding miniatures linked with a robust, epically optimistic theme.