Seattle Symphony Opening Night: Rossini, Rachmaninoff, Verdi, and Respighi:  Gerard Schwarz, cond., Lang Lang, piano, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 16.09.2006 (BJ)

 

In the nature of things, Opening Night concerts in American orchestral seasons tend to be fairly tinselly affairs, and this one was no exception. Against the background of some regrettable strife in recent months between the music director and a faction among his players, it was good to hear Gerard Schwarz enthusiastically applauded when he came on stage, and equally good to find the orchestra in as fine fettle as ever. Musically speaking, however, the concert was something of a mixed bag.

The works programmed fell into three categories: Rossini’s William Tell overture and the Triumphal March and Ballet from Verdi’s Aida represented Italian opera; the somewhat sparser landscape of Italian orchestral music was glimpsed in the shape of Respighi’s Pines of Rome; and, as a vehicle for the evening’s soloist, Russian music–though still with an Italian connection–came on the scene with Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

For a semi-artistic, semi-social jamboree of this nature, there can be no complaint about that mixture of styles and sources, but I felt that some sections of the program fared distinctly better than others. It was the two operatic Italian pieces that came off best. After a sumptuous presentation of the opening cello quintet, William Tell tingled along in lively fashion, and both here and in the Aida excerpt the orchestra’s splendid trumpet section did itself proud. The decline in actual musical inspiration as the sublime banality of the march degenerates into the ordinary banality of the ballet music remained evident, but that is Verdi’s fault, or the fault of the circumstances surrounding the work’s genesis, rather than anything that can be laid to the charge of the performers.

Trumpets again, predictably enough, had a field day in Respighi’s Pines. Schwarz marshaled with skill and authority the luxurious instrumental forces distributed not just on the platform but elsewhere around the auditorium, and drew some magical sonorities from his orchestra especially in the more nocturnal and mysterious sections of this too often snobbishly underrated work. The closing tableau, however, in which the remorseless tramp of the ancient consular army along the Appian Way is pictured, lacked the frisson of almost palpable physical fear that Respighi’s deceptively innocent brass fanfares can produce in the listener–and have produced, for me, in performances conducted by Riccardo Muti. Behind all the panoply of such military jubilation, the composer evidently remembers, lies a harsher reality: if Rome was not built in a day, it was not built without bloodshed either. However much Pini di Roma may indulge Respighi’s–and our–taste for the picturesque, its deeper strength lies in its refusal to evade sterner matters. Here, by and large, is a stirring rather than merely pretty or anecdotal vision of an empire’s grandeur, and it did not quite attain that stature in this polished and at times poetic performance.

The Respighi had been followed, at the end of the concert’s first half, by a performance of the Paganini Rhapsody that was puzzling. Hardly anyone, by now, needs to be told that Lang Lang, at the age of 24, is a star of high magnitude. When I first heard him, in his late teens, he was already a phenomenal communicator, a wizard of the keyboard, and a musician of considerable promise. More recent encounters have prompted the sad suspicion that he has come to believe rather too readily in the hype that has surrounded him. The wizardry is still dazzling, and much of the communicative charm survives, but in terms of interpretation the state of affairs is less satisfactory.

Lang Lang’s pianism on this occasion was certainly brilliant. Yet there was a curious not-there-ness about the performance for which I was at a loss to find an explanation. Then the pianist put me in his debt by offering, as the first of two encores, Traümerei from Schumann’s Kinderscenen. Suddenly, he showed me just what is missing from his playing these days: it is any ability to get inside the music. If ever a piece demanded intimacy, or Schumann’s characteristic “Innigkeit,” that piece is Traümerei–yet it was set forth for all the world like a public oration.  I do not underestimate the challenge of achieving intimacy in a hall that seats more than 2,000 listeners, but the great pianists, men like Richter and Moravec, have shown us over and over again that it is possible, whereas, for Lang Lang, “Innig” is at the moment something that he just doesn’t do. I continue to hope that the awesome talent he displayed early on may one day come to be fully realized. But for that to happen he, and perhaps his mentors, will need to do some radical rethinking of purposes and priorities.

 

 

Bernard Jacobson