Shoot Out the Lights With a Rarity From the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic raised some eyebrows last year when they resurrected Richard Strauss’ rarely performed Symphonia Domestica. The composer conducted the world premiere in New York in 1904, to bad reviews, and soon afterward essentially disowned it. And that’s too bad. In typical Strauss fashion, it’s vast and meticulously detailed. As a portrait of marital angst, it’s not the classical music precursor to Richard and Linda Thompson’s iconic Shoot Out the Lights, but there are many similarities. There’s a brave recent live recording with Zubin Mehta leading the London Philharmonic Orchestra, streaming at Spotify, that may make classical fans reconsider this vivid, cinematic, slyly humorous and persistently cynical symphony.
Meant to be performed as a single contiguous movement, right off the bat there’s a uh-oh motif as the husband and wife get into a pre-dinner spat, riffs leaping from far corners of the orchestra. It seems that they’re “doing it for the kid,” as the cliche goes. There’s a proto-Woody Allen sensibility to much of this, a quintessentially cosmopolitan couple in distress. Tenderness and shrill combative swells joust for centerstage as Mehta leads the ensemble upward to an uneasy grandeur, the strings receding with an aching vibrato as gentleness returns: the baby wakes up. And then the fight hits fever pitch.
The wounded theme in the third “movement” is where Mehta and the orchestra hold the music in check, to masterful effect: as the program notes indicate, this is tears before bedtime. Even the poor kid’s dreams afterward are turbulent, as the winds bubbling amid dreamy strings give way to a towering heroic tableau.
From there, there’s the usual Strauss sturm und drang, themes intermingled meticulously, the whole group including the percussion section busting springs if not strings. Is the oboe theme afterward a concession to an afterglow, or an ominous portent? It would seem the latter, the orchestra’s lustre notwithstanding.
The horror movie motives return and lurk beneath the next morning’s bustle as its bellicose proportions grow gargantuan…and all of a sudden the clouds clear, with an almost prayerful violin theme. It’s here where the composer loses the thread: the majestry and triumph of the conclusion comes across as strained and farfetched, no matter how many devious false endings Mehta gives the audience to smile at.
Maybe to sweeten the pot – and bring a few converts into the fold – the album also includes a live performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. For Mehta and the orchestra, there’s plenty of life left in this old warhorse. His direction is finely detailed and on the slow side in the first movement, ingenue versus murderous dictator as their famous, ersatz Middle Eastern cat-and-mouse game gets underway. Violinist Henrik Hochschild’s silken legato is a persistent high point.
Contrasts, suspense and warlike foreshadowing are in welcome hi-definition throughout the second movement, up to a fierce conclusion. Scheherazade’s travelers’ tales and bedtime stories are especially lush and on the muted side in the third movement, pierced by puckish, precise winds. Orchestras love to play this because everyone gets involved, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s harmonies, particularly in the brass and swirling strings of the concluding movement, are so imaginative and colorful. In the end, love conquers all. As it has to, ultimately, for the world to survive. Have you reminded your loved ones not to take the needle of death this year?
Defiance, Relevance and Transcendence With the New York Philharmonic in Prospect Park
So many inspiring conclusions to take away from the New York Philharmonic’s phantasmagorically majestic performance this past evening in Prospect Park. In the year of the Metoo movement, that the orchestra would choose a centerpiece celebrating a mythic heroine who disarms a psychotic dictator using only her wits spoke volumes.
As does the organization’s long-running Very Young Composers mentorship and advocacy program. Two of those individuals were represented on the bill, each a young African-American woman and a native Brooklynite. And in what’s been a challengingly transitional interregnum between music directors, the choice of James Gaffigan to lead the ensemble through some stunningly fresh, meticulously articulated, relevatory interpretations of material they’ve probably played dozens of times before paid mighty dividends.
At a concert pitched to pull a family audience, local city council representative Brad Lander’s commentary on the ongoing anguish of families being broken up by the ongoing extremist clampdown on immigrants was the night’s most overtly political moment. A polyglot crowd echoed their fervent, familial solidarity, then the orchestra spoke to how triumphantly this scenario could actually play out.
They foreshadowed the suspense and splendor of their romp through Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade with an arguably even more carnivalesque stampede through the Bacchanale from Saint-Saens’ opera Samson and Delilah. Even if its creepy chromatics aren’t much more than Hollywood hijaz, those Arabic inflections were another crushingly relevant reference point.
If the program’s two brief, kinetic works by young composers Jordan Millar and Camryn Cowan are any indication, the blues are as much alive in Brooklyn as they were during the Harlem Renaissance, a most welcome meme throughout the New York City public schools this year and a vivid theme for these two gradeschoolers. Each composer’s piece put simple, emphatic blues hooks front and center in lieu of expansive harmony or flourishes, the former with a neat, cold stop midway through and some unexpected, Mozartean lustre afterward.
The orchestra made it to the concert’s midway point with three jaunty, frequently coy excerpts from Leonard Bernstein’s score to On the Town. The Philharmonic’s pretty-much-annual tour of the New York City parks system, from the Bronx to Staten Island, always features a little bit of everything, including what in another century would have been called “pops” material from outside the classical canon. But as with the rest of the program, Gaffigan didn’t deviate from the game plan or phone these in, airing out the composer’s exchanges of voicings with a painterly charm.
And as much as the park programming is standard repertoire, the Philharmonic never picks tired or cheesy material. Over the last few years, we’ve been treated to plenty of Stravinsky – notably a conflagration of The Firebird in Central Park a couple years back – as well as a similarly colorful tour of Respighi’s Pines of Rome a little before then. Considering both the political subtext and the stunning attention to detail from both Gaffigan and the orchestra, this could have been the best of all of them since the turn of the decade.
Getting to witness it from the best seat in the house – about the equivalent of row L at their Lincoln Center home – no doubt colored this perception. Looking out into the wide swath of greenery in front of them, it must be tempting for everyone onstage to want to play loud, but Gaffigan mined the entirety of the sonic spectrum in keeping with the composer’s top-to-bottom orchestration. When there was suspense, it was relentless; when there was menace, it was a carnival of potentially dead souls; when there were dreamy interludes, they had a celestial vastness.
And the solos, tantalizingly brief as they were, were mesmerizing. Concertmaster Frank Huang spun joyously expert filigrees and flickers, up to an almost shocking cadenza in the final movement where he dug in so hard it seemed that he might break a violin string. Similar effects – especially bassoonist Judith LeClair’s silken, mutedly bittersweet solo – further underscored a triumphant narrative mirroring both the angst and transgressive victories in so many of the world’s ongoing struggles and rebellions.
The Philharmonic’s 2018 tour of the boroughs concludes on Sunday, June 17 indoors at 3 PM at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island.
An Ambitious Take on Some Familiar Challenges by the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony
It’s often overlooked how changes in one field of music often mirror those in another. The rise of the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony into a reliably bonafide vehicle for first-class classical performance mirrors how the demise of the big record labels has relegated the realm of rock and other amplified original music to independent artists. Other volunteer New York orchestral ensembles – the well-loved Greenwich Village Orchestra, the innovative Chelsea Symphony and the fearlessly individualistic new Queensboro Symphony Orchestra – deliver quality programming, but in the past several months especially, none of them have surpassed their Park Avenue colleagues. Nor, it seems, has the New York Philharmonic.
Conductor David Bernard never made a connection he didn’t want to share with the world, an especially ambitious goal at the Park Avenue group’s concert this past Saturday night. First on the bill was a spine-tingling take of Borodin’s Polyvestian Dances. As a curtain-lifter, it was a whale of a challenge, but the maestro’s clenched-teeth, “we’re going to pull this off come hell or high water” presence pulled every available ounce of energy and impassioned playing out of the musicians onstage. A few years back, this group’s weak spot was the high strings, which would lag sometimes or fall out of sync. No more. Wow! What a thrill it was to hear the shivery, staccato cascades of this rampaging Russian dance suite fly with equal parts abandon and minute focus from stage right.
The intensity continued courtesy of guest pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who stunned the crowd with a fiercely and similarly impassioned, marathon run through the fortissimo torrents and machinegunning virtuoso volleys of Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 22. While the dynamically rich, goosebump-inducing High Romantic swells and dips through triumph and angst and finally more triumph in the end were centered in the piano, the orchestra is also highly engaged rather than a backdrop, and the lushness and frequent solo passages from throughout the group were robust and assured.
Concluding the program was a particularly ambitious multimedia performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade, with violinist Bela Horvath in the solo spotlight with his silken, often downright plaintive resonance. There were also projections, and narrator Peninnah Schram in the role of “storyteller.” Many times an orchestra will provide a program listing the various points in a piece that illustrate one thing or another; Schram, with her precise, rhythmic cadences, kept perfect pace with the music as she related the story, a triumph of feminist pacifism over a power-and-grief-crazed tyrant.
Here’s where things got crazy, and not because the orchestra and Schram weren’t locked in, because they were. When the narration was audible, the effect was a refreshing change from, say, flipping through the program like you might do with a paperback edition of Shakespeare at Shakespeare in the Park to follow along with the plotline. Trouble is, it wasn’t always, and this was neither the fault of the orchestra – which Bernard kept on a steady, dynamic pace through the work’s famously austere, ambered quasi-orientalisms – nor Schram either. The problem was that the speakers she was running through were placed too close to the stage, and facing the crowd rather than, say, facing each further back, along the sidelines where sonic competition with the mighty group onstage wouldn’t have been an issue. And this wouldn’t even have been a factor had the orchestra been playing Jazz at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall, both venues where they’ve performed before with richly good results.
The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony’s next concert is December 6 at 3 PM at Rose Theatre at Jazz at Lincoln Center, focusing on a theme of innovation and paradigm shifts, pairing Gershwin’s Concerto in F with pianist Ted Rosenthal alongside Bartok’s challenging, high-voltage Concerto for Orchestra.
