SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Barber, Prokofiev, Berlioz: Yuja Wang (piano), The Philadelphia Orchestra, Charles Dutoit (conductor), Carnegie Hall, New York City, 13.10.2009 (JE)

Barber Adagio for Strings, Op. 11
Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16
Berlioz  Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14


For people who love classical music, these are confusing times.   At least it seems this way in New York City, where music journalists and bloggers assert that traditional concert halls serve up desiccated classics to cadaverous audiences and declare that trendy clubs are the concert venues of the future. I feared, on my way to Carnegie Hall, that the doomsayers and trendsetters might be right; that the too-familiar program of the Philadelphia Orchestra, an orchestra reported to be in administrative disarray, might prove to be a Cassandra that everyone believes.    

As a rebuke to the doubters, the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its chief conductor Charles Dutoit (the orchestra is currently without a music director) offered a traditional program superbly played.  The concert opened with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, interpreted with cultivated transparency, allowing the second violins and violas, the inner voices, to sing in a way that restrained the perfervid melody.  This voicing conveyed an intimacy, as if the sections of the orchestra were speaking among themselves, and a tender melancholy, felt more often in the original string quartet movement (on which the arrangement is based) than in orchestral amplification.  

The Adagio was followed by Prokofiev’s exuberant second piano concerto, featuring the dazzling virtuoso, Yuja Wang, as soloist.  Wang’s technical facility has been widely noted, but her lyricism and insight are even more impressive, especially as she canvassed the concerto. Prokofiev often uses mechanistic repetition to tighten structure and intensify expression, but in these four movements repetition diffuses the form, slacking the sentiment of the music so that the piano emerges as a stark disclosure, a barque adrift in gusts and fog. Wang mastered the rigging. Her startling dynamics build tension, particularly in the cadenzas, which she then slowly releases, using refined voicing and incisive phrasing to intimate melody and expose the work’s coherence.

The final work on the program, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, contains the passions of unrequited love the way some French topiary gardens embody the animals of the forest. The images are there, and not exactly lifeless, but unnatural and manicured. Dutoit’s inspired tempos and ethereal textures illuminated the “opium-induced” fantasy of a composer besotted, not only by the Shakespearian actress Harriet Smithson, but by Gluck and Beethoven as well.  There was nothing confusing about the effect of this radiant performance, of course, but I did leave the hall wondering why the denizens of the classical music world are so eager to “March to the Scaffold” when Carnegie Hall reliably offers thrilling programs.

Jeffrey Edelstein