Grieg, John Williams, and Schumann: Arild Remmereit, cond., Seth Krimsky, bassoon, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 16.11.2006 (BJ)

 

Comparisons may be odious, but on occasion they obtrude themselves so emphatically on the mind as to be inescapable. It was bad luck for the young Arild Remmereit that his debut appearance with the Seattle Symphony came just after two weeks in which the orchestra surpassed itself under the baton of the even younger Dutchman, Lawrence Renes.

As it happens, the comparisons went in two different directions. For all his evident skill, Remmereit’s conducting suffered seriously in the aftermath of Renes’s positively volcanic impact; but in the matter of the new and relatively new works they respectively presented, John Harbison’s Double-Bass Concerto and John Williams’s de facto bassoon concerto titled The Five Sacred Trees, the Williams piece conducted by Remmereit easily, to my mind, outshone the Harbison.

Surely, you may say, Harbison is a serious composer, while we know John Williams mainly for his film music. But when people say, as they are wont to do, “We all know so-and-so’s film music, and his new symphony sounds like it,” what is usually implicit is that the composer has a recognizable musical personality–hardly the worst of insults. Few people in the US or Western Europe probably know that Shostakovich wrote more for the movies than for any other medium–from New Babylon in 1928/29 to The Envoys of Eternity in 1971, some 36 scores; if we had a chance of hearing those scores more than once in ten years or so, we might well find ourselves pointing out how much like them his symphonies and concertos sound.

All this is by way of preamble to the observation that Harbison’s concerto is a praiseworthy but not ultimately very memorable essay in a particularly challenging medium, whereas Williams’s work is not merely colorful, brilliantly scored, and skillfully designed but also chock-full of beguiling musical character, quite apart from its involvement with environmental issues reflected in five sacred trees of Ireland and the prayers associated with them. Laid out in five movements with a total duration of a little over 20 minutes, the piece projects the same feeling for sensuous and not in the least overblown beauty that has distinguished Williams’s work in every medium. There is no striving for grandiose effect. The music creates a sense, rather, of lyrical intimacy and charm as the bassoon, having begun with a flexible soliloquy in the manner of a cadenza, goes on to enjoy friendly ruminative conversations with a succession of its orchestral colleagues, including its own bassoon family. The strings in general provide sympathetic comments, and there are a few fully-scored tutti interludes for dynamic contrast.

Premiered in 1995 by the New York Philharmonic’s principal bassoonist, Judith LeClair, for whom it was commissioned, the work found a superb champion on this occasion in the person of the Seattle Symphony’s Seth Krimsky, who, himself a composer, evinced total comprehension of Williams’s intentions, and fulfilled them to the letter. Altogether, it was a pleasure at long last to encounter in the flesh, as it were, a piece I knew only abstractly through having written the program notes for that 1995 premiere. Furthermore, Remmereit here did his own best work of the evening, supporting his soloist with evident care and a high degree of precision.

In a suite from Grieg’s Peer Gynt, however, and in Schumann’s First Symphony, those qualities proved to be a double-edged sword. The performances of these works suffered not so much from a lack of attention to detail as from an excess of it. I would submit that indicating every last nuance, every entry, every dynamic modification as fussily and emphatically as Remmereit did in his performances of these works is both unnecessary (on the night, that is–what a conductor does in rehearsal is his own business) and somewhat insulting to an orchestra of the Seattle Symphony’s quality. To offer just one extreme example, in the Schumann scherzo, an officious thrust of the baton on the third beat of the fifth measure was surely superfluous. I cannot swear that the sound of the syncopation was in itself vitiated, but it was certainly spoiled for members of the audience, including me, because listeners are inevitably affected not only by what they hear but also by what they see.

That, of course, is a mere detail, but it was symptomatic of a way of over-conducting that robbed both the 19th-century pieces of much of their character. If Remmereit can bring himself to have more faith in his players, and to devote more of his attention in performance to listening and inspiring and less to giving instruction and showing us all that he knows the score, he may yet become a conductor to reckon with. For the moment, it seems to me, his talent is no more than (anagrammatically) latent.

 

Bernard Jacobson