Gorging on Shostakovich

It's a good sign for a performance when a professional music reviewer stays for the second half. Friday night, I went with my friend Peter who used to review for the Washington papers, plus his partner, Paul, and Robert to hear the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Stereotypically, Peter leaves at the intermission when we go to things, but he actually stayed for the whole show this time.

I don't know why, but it often seems to me that many music reviewers leave at intermission. Publishing deadlines? I don't know....maybe in New York, but in other cities, the reviews typically don't appear in the papers the next morning, but not until the following day. There have been many performances, though, where I've been on stage or in the audience, and when I read the review, it seemed as though the "review" was largely written from the advance press materials provided by the company and then the reviewer would make some general glowing comments about things, then always there would be one little negative observation--always from something in the first act--to "prove" that the reviewer was actually there.

Well, we actually went to the entire concert and stayed to the very end, when, as it turned out, the most interesting thing of the evening happened; more about that later.

It seems as though the NSO is going through a series of guest conductors, austensibly "auditioning" for the soon-to-be-vacant post of music director, what with the impending retirement of Leonard Slatkin at the end of this season. This weekend's guest conductor is Mark Elder, CBE,a Brit who's currently music director of The Hallé, the orchestra in Manchester, England. Elder was, I thought, a very understated conductor, and the musicians played well for him with a tight, focused, and together sound.

The programming choices for the evening were a little odd, and I was hard pressed to find a theme running though them, though the official idea was that the works all showed the juxtaposition of sadness and joy.

They opened with Stravinsky's Danses Concertantes, a work, actually, for chamber orchestra. The small ensemble was gathered around the podium and came up with a surprisingly intimate sound. I thought it interesting to note how, what with all these years of being subjected to modern music, I found the Stravinsky to sound rather old-fashioned. Phil had warned us that during Thursday's performance, he found the Stravinsky to be incredibly boring and he couldn't wait for it to get over; we didn't come away with as negative an impression of it Friday.

After a brief pause to allow the stage crew to reset the chairs for the full orchestra and to bring on the piano, we met the piano soloist for the evening, Canadian Louis Lortie. I was very pleased to see Lortie wearing the proper white tie and tails for his performance (Mo. Elder was wearing one of those hideous European black Nehru jacket things that hung on him like an untailored sack coat).

Lortie played the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat major, Op. 10. He brought a special piano in for the performance, but I thought it had rather too bright a sound. Lortie seemed to have fun playing, rather insouciantly wagging his head from side to side as he played. I don't know, perhaps some of the cadenzas sounded a little ragged and rushed with a little too much crash and bang. Peter opined, though, that Lortie sounded to him like a "drunken lounge pianist."

He returned to the stage in the second half of the concert to play the major piano part in Francis Poulenc's little private ballet commission, Aubade, concerto chorégraphique for piano and 18 instruments. I thought Lortie's playing was much more sensitive in this piece. Once again, the stage was arranged for this small ensemble that, interestingly, included strings but no violins. I was unfamiliar with the work; it didn't really recall other Poulenc harmonies and compositional structures. Peter had heard a recording of this before, and thought the instant performance not as "sweet" as the recording.

The final work of the evening (after yet another pause to rearrange the stage) was the Shostakovich Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 54. I've never really understood the concept of Russian politics in music, but this is supposedly a piece that is gloriously "Soviet." I've always found the very long first movement Largo to be rather boring and unexciting (is that an analogy for life in Soviet Russia?); things don't pick up until the second and third movements. Those movements can be very demanding for an orchestra, and I thought the NSO acquitted themselves well.

The Shostakovich gave us an opportunity for an amusing moment for the evening. Now, for those of you who have never been in the Concert Hall at the Kennedy Center, the hall's stage is designed as a platform with a sort of sound shell behind it, with no curtains, wings, or other theatrical stage trappings. In the back are also the organ pipes and seating for about 70 in what are called "choristers," the place where the choir sits during choral-orchestral performances. If no choir is on the agenda, those seats are sold to the general public at the cheapest price in the house. Well, this is spring break season, so some school group bought up about four dozen of those tickets and the kids got to listen from there. Except, about halfway through the long Largo, there was an incident.

One of the boys sitting on the end of the front row got sick and apparently lost his dinner. Now, I didn't exactly see the event in question, but I did notice the reaction from the twelve or so teenaged girls in the row next to him as they all melodramatically, in the way only teenaged girls can do, covered their noses with their hands, jackets, and blankets, and several of them scooted away, filling in empty seats on the row and even sharing seats. Meanwhile, a teacher/chaperone guided the boy out of his seat and took him outside. Eventually, a house staff member came to the end of the row to inspect the "damage" and left, apparently deciding it could wait the fifteen minutes or so til the end of the concert. The girls, though, maintained their act for the rest of the evening, though I can't imagine that things were all that bad, since the people on the row directly behind the boy's seat seemed to have little to no reaction. Needless to say, Maestro was not pleased, and during the break between movements, he seemed to be staring the girls down and glowering at them.

The poor boy. The ultimate indignity, though, was that when we left the auditorium and were out in the inner lobby, the boy and teacher/chaperone were sitting on a sofa where everyone could walk by and stare at him. I suppose he'll have memories of Washington to talk about when he gets back home!

Scrubbing the strings

Last night Ian, Laurent, and I went to the Kennedy Center to hear the National Symphony Orchestra play an all-Russian concert. Before the concert, we met up with Phil, but, even though I had an extra ticket, we couldn't talk him into moving downstairs and joining us.

The NSO played three pieces, two by Rachmaninoff and one in the middle by Prokofiev. The Rachmaninoff works were both nicely melodic, at times sounding a bit like a motion picture score. The Prokofiev, though, was half an hour of the cellist scrubbing his bow back and forth across the strings.

The evening opened with Three Études-tableaux. These were three of the five études-tableaux that had been orchestrated by Ottorino Respighi from Rachmaninoff's original piano pieces. They chose "March," "The Sea and the Seagulls," and "The Fair."

Alban Gerhardt was the featured cellist for the Prokofiev, Sinfonia concertante for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 125. It seemed like quite a difficult work for the cellist, but the composition itself was not "musical" and not pretty at all. He had to do a lot of sawing on the strings and there was a lot of rather rough chordal pizzicato that I often though might break the strings. It was certainly an athletic work, though, and Gerhardt's shock of straight dark blond hair provided punctuation to his movements. While I was not all that impressed with the work, the audience loved it, giving Gerhardt an immediate standing ovation and three curtain calls.

Gerhardt then played an encore, choosing a composition by Mstislav Rostropovich called "Moderato." That got two curtain calls.

After intermission, we heard Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44. It was fine, though the ending is rather subdued, so the audience wasn't as enthusiastic at the end as it had been for Gerhardt. There were a couple of very nice solo moments for the concertmistress, especially in the second movement.

One of my little thanksgivings for the evening was that the audience did not applaud between movements.

On the podium last night was Austrian Hans Graf, current music director of the Houston Symphony. He was a decidedly straightforward and non-flamboyant conductor, but he kept the oft-times unruly NSO together and unusually well disciplined.

Graf and Gerhardt both wore these hideous Euro-style black Nehru jackets (although it looked from a distance as though they were collarless) with a black satin placket running down the front. They looked baggy and were not flattering on either man. The concertmistress, who has quite a variety of dresses—some elegant, some unfortunate—chose to wear not a dress, but tight black pants (leather??) with a shiny black blouse that was rather short and gathered at the waist; she looked almost like she was dressed to go horseback riding.

The Mahler Second is coming up soon. I'm looking forward to going to hear it, especially since Iván Fischer will be conducting. Hope it works out....the one concert I wanted to hear in the fall (Elgar Cello Concerto and Saint-Saens Organ Symphony) I didn't get to hear.