Piano soundings

It's like we've gotten a new conductor in Washington.

Two weeks in a row now, I've been to a National Symphony Orchestra concert at the Kennedy Center with NSO's music director Leonard Slatkin on the podium, and the orchestra has been brilliant, the conducting inspired, and the entire ensemble of players and conductor have been together and have been right on the money with one another. This is the famous Slatkin who put the Saint Louis Symphony "on the map" in the 1980s and '90s, and who came to Washington with such excitement and high expectations a dozen years ago. I've missed "that" Slatkin the past few years in D.C., but, wow! he's back now in his final season at NSO before he goes off to Detroit as music director and Pittsburgh as principal guest conductor.

If you want to hear him with the NSO, you have to wait until after Christmas now, as he's not scheduled again to conduct until January, but do make a point to come hear him if you can.

Last night, Jon, Ryan, and I went to hear the NSO and famed piano soloist Emanuel Ax. Twas a lovely performance.

NSO saved Ax for the second half of the concert. He lumbered out on stage as if playing the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major with a major international orchestra were the simplest, most lackadaisical thing in the world to be doing. Then, rather than showboating to the audience, he played to the orchestra, nodding at players, watching them play, and occasionally keeping time with a shake of his jowls. When it was time for him to play, he loomed over the keyboard, his arms spread wide and his elbows always out more than I would find comfortable. The keys were his, though, and he hoarded them, making them sing the way of his choosing.

The Brahms has been a well-known part of the piano repertoire for over a century, and Ax did a fine interpretation. The first two movements are both fast allegros, rather massive, and quite typical of a major piano concerto.

One of the gems of this concerto, though, is the third movement "Andante," where the cello joins in as a major player, almost as if this piece were a double concerto. The cello duties fell to NSO principal cellist David Hardy, who played his 1694 Carlo Testore instrument exquisitely. Hardy is actually a Baltimore native who studied at the Peabody Conservatory there, and right out of college he was appointed associate principal cellist by NSO's late music director Mstislav Rostropovich, himself an internationally reknowned cellist. That should certainly say something about Hardy and his abilities! Today, Hardy has been principal since 1994, having spent practically his entire career at NSO; he's a tall, slender man with immaculately groomed silver hair, rimless glasses, and a very upright, formal air about him. He seemed almost embarrassed during the curtain calls as Ax repeated brought him forward for a bow.

The final movement of the concerto is an allegretto, a suitably playful bit that matched well Ax's whimsy in playing. The audience awarded Ax some four curtain calls after the performance.

The first half of the concert was as though the music were from two totally different worlds. Starting with American William Schuman's "Prayer in Time of War," then ending with Englishman Ralph Vaughn-Williams' Symphony No. 6 in E minor, both of these post-World War II works were loud and brassy at times, yet both conveying sorrow and introspection. This is also a pair of pieces that helps to clearly demonstrate the major difference between sitting at home listening to a CD or MP3 of orchestral works and hearing them live and in person in a concert hall. One very simply cannot use electronic recordings and the compression necessary to transmit them and appreciate the full dynamic range and emotion of these works, from very very loud portions to the very very soft.

Schuman is one of those "modern" composers who can at times be rather trying. I liked this work, though, and I thought it was quite approachable. I was previously unfamiliar with it, but it's a good bit, and I hope someone records it so it can be heard by more people.

Before last night, I never appreciated the Vaughn-Williams Sixth. This is largely because of having to hear it in recorded form, and there's just absolutely no way to appreciate this music—especially the last movement "Epilogue"—without sitting in a concert hall. This was a particularly good reading, too, with Slatkin and NSO in synch together, Slatkin even at times jumping around and almost dancing on the podium.

Many people are familiar with Vaughn-Williams because of his church hymns—"standards" like Sine Nomine (For all the saints), Salve festa dies (Hail thee, festival day), King's Weston (At the Name of Jesus every knee shall bow), Down Ampney (Come down, O Love divine)—but his orchestral music is very, very different. This particular symphony is shockingly modern for those used to Vaughn-Williams' melodic hymns, as it's rather bombastic at times, almost jazzy at others, and even makes rather odd use of a saxophone. It's also played as one continuous bit with no break between movements.

What enthralled me about the Sixth, though, was what I'd never been able to appreciate on a recording: the Epilogue. The entire movement is played with the loudest dynamic a pianissimo, and much of the orchestra work was even softer than that at times. This made the audience have to sit forward in their seats, nearly straining to listen, nearly holding their breaths to hear. There was no big ending, no bombastic explosion of virtuosity, just the sad, soft, undulating tunes, like a lost child wandering aimlessly in the night.

Yet, even with the quiet and uncertain ending of the work, the symphony moved the audience to award two curtain calls.

Definitely, this was a memorable musical experience.

I moved our seats up a bit for this concert, since I wanted to be able to see the piano and the keyboard. The Kennedy Center Concert Hall has a rather unique seating arrangement on the orchestra level. If one were to draw a long tic-tac-toe grid, that's pretty much how the floor plan looks (not counting the four levels of horseshoe boxes and balconies). For orchestral music, I usually sit towards the back of the hall in the upper center section of the "grid" for the best sound blend; last night, we were in the center square, a section the orchestra management considers to be the "orchestra prime" section. I really don't know why. A few rows back or even forward to the top or bottom center grid sections, or across the aisles to the side sections, and there's at least a $20 ticket price drop. All that pricing stuff makes no sense to me. When I go to the opera or the ballet, I like to be up front in the first couple of rows so I can see the singers and dancers work, and those are actually the cheapest seats in the orchestra level.

Afterwards, we walked into Georgetown for dinner. More on that in another post.