Brahms arr. Sheng, Rachmaninoff, and Beethoven: Gerard Schwarz, cond., Barry Douglas, piano, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 01.10.2006 (BJ)

 

These days, pianists that can play Rachmaninoff’s music with all the consuming passion, lyrical melancholy, and digital brilliance it demands are two a penny. But a rarity still is the artist capable, in addition to those qualities, of bringing to it (or perhaps I should say drawing from it) an equal measure of the elegance and nobility no less fundamental to the composer’s complex nature. In my own experience, one pianist of that caliber has been the Cuban-born Santiago Rodriguez, who indeed it was that effected, through his playing, my rather shamefully late discovery that Rachmaninoff was a genius far more substantial than I had previously thought.

Well, in the opening subscription program of the Seattle Symphony’s season, Barry Douglas fashioned a performance of the Third Piano Concerto that matched, perhaps surpassed, any I have previously heard, either from Rodriguez, or from that other great Rachmaninoffian, Alexis Weissenberg. It would be hard to exaggerate the sheer splendor of the Irish pianist’s technique. Brilliantly luminous tone works together with discreet pedaling to create a line that is crystalline in clarity without ever lacking heft, and the resulting line is set forth with what Douglas’s compatriot George Bernard Shaw used to call the most accurate “marksmanship,” and articulated on the launching-pad of tinglingly propulsive rhythm. And then, technique is only the beginning. For what was most striking was the sheer humanity, at once elevated and profound, that illuminated every bar of the piano part–a quality not surprising if one takes note of Douglas’s dedication to the musical life of his native land: like many an Irish luminary before him, he lives in Paris, but he also maintains a home in Ireland, where he has created a fine chamber orchestra (Camerata Ireland) and a festival that aims to give a platform to Irish performers too often neglected by the country’s musical establishment.

The Seattle Symphony, under music director Gerard Schwarz’s baton, rose superbly to the challenge proposed by such a soloist, demonstrating once again that it is among the finest orchestras in the United States. For that matter, I do not think there can be an orchestra anywhere in the world today with a horn section commanding as wonderful a sound as we heard after intermission in the trio section of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Nor was that by any means the only virtue of the performance. I have not usually counted the core Beethoven/Schubert/Brahms symphonic repertoire among Maestro Schwarz’s greatest strengths. He is unsurpassed in Mahler and Shostakovich–witness last season’s stunning performances of the former’s Seventh Symphony and the latter’s Eighth–and he can give you some satisfying Mozart too, but in such works as the Beethoven symphonies the insights he offers have sometimes seemed less specific, less personal or illuminating.

Not so on this occasion. The Eroica received a reading of compelling intensity, distinguished among other things by some beautifully delineated inner parts. There are too many conductors under whose direction Beethoven’s repeated 8th-note accompaniments in the strings degenerate into undifferentiated scrubbing. Here there was no scrubbing, no chugging, but a sense that the music, even in its least conspicuous instrumental lines, was always moving, always going somewhere. Exemplary, too, was the conductor’s marshaling of tempos in the service of musical logic. It would certainly be possible to feel that the pace he set for the Funeral March movement was on the old-fashioned slow side; but, having set, he diversified it subtly in the more active sections of the movement, and then, after beginning the last big reprise of the main theme at an inevitably faster speed, reined the music back in masterly fashion to re-establish the original stately pulse.

As to Black Swan, the opening work on the program, I hope the conductor will forgive me for suggesting that his long-standing devotion to the music of Bright Sheng led this time to a somewhat exaggerated billing. The piece is no less, but certainly no more, than an orchestration of Brahms’s A-major Intermezzo for piano, Op. 118 No. 2. Like Rubbra in his orchestral arrangement of Brahms’s Handel Variations, Sheng has not sought to recreate a Brahmsian orchestral sound, but rather has enjoyed himself in creating some effective, even beautiful, sonorities, especially in the brasses. But orchestrating something and giving it an evocative title do not a new composition make, and it seems to me that calling this a “world premiere,” stating that the work was “composed: 2006,” and listing Sheng’s name next to Brahms’s in letters of equal size all went inappropriately far. Interestingly, however, Sheng’s thoroughly professional arrangement did prove one point of interest in the matter of instrumental characteristics: the rhetorical climax of Brahms’s lovely piece, which comes when the rhythm of the main theme is varied by shifting its fourth note forward half a beat, goes for nothing when the piano, with its clear ictus, is replaced by the smoother sonorities of a string-centered orchestral ensemble.

Never mind. As a curtain-raiser, Black Swan was inoffensive enough, and the concert it ushered in was a triumph for all concerned.

 

Bernard Jacobson