SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

Britten, Stravinsky, and Berlioz: Leonard Slatkin, conductor, Julian Rachlin, violin, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 20.3.2009 (BJ)


For this critic at least, one of the greatest pleasures of the profession is the opportunity it sometimes affords to watch a musician grow from mere competence into something much more than that. There was a time when my impression of Leonard Slatkin was of a conductor who was always well prepared and always firmly in charge of proceedings, but whose performances didn’t turn me on. The Slatkin I heard at work in this concert was a very different animal.

The change was actually presaged for me a few years ago when I had occasion to review one of those CDs that arrive monthly with the BBC Music Magazine. This one contained Slatkin’s performance of the Vaughan Williams Sea Symphony, a work that is close to my heart, and that I can claim to know inside out, having been a member of the chorus in a performance of it back in my student days.

“Great” is a word that should not be tossed around lightly. But that performance, recorded at a Royal Albert Hall concert in 2001, was the greatest I have ever heard of the work, surpassing even the achievement of Sir Adrian Boult, the finest Vaughan Williams interpreter of an earlier generation. And at this Seattle Symphony concert the kind of inspiration Slatkin’s Sea Symphony breathed was again overwhelmingly on display.

The Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes opened the program decked out in the most vivid orchestral colors, and set forth with consuming rhythmic impulse. Next came Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, one of those neo-classical pieces that command respect rather than warm affection. This account of it was as persuasive as could be wished. The soloist, Lithuanian-born Julian Rachlin, had a hard act to follow, given the transcendent violin-playing we had heard from Tasmin Little just a week earlier in the Elgar concerto, but he made a strong impression in his own right. His articulation was crisp, his tone as voluptuous as Stravinsky’s unsentimental writing permits, and his collaboration with conductor and orchestra seemed exceptionally pleasurable.

Still, the biggest thrills of the evening came in the main work, as they must in any adequate interpretation of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Here Slatkin led a performance that realized almost every one of the composer’s path-breaking orchestral inventions perfectly. At the same time, the classical background that Berlioz inherited from Gluck and Beethoven was kept clearly in view, especially in a flawlessly paced reading of the slow movement that featured an eloquent duet between Stefan Farkas’s english horn and Shannon Spicciati’s offstage oboe.

One example of the conductor’s assured judgement came at the exposition repeat in the first movement. When the Allegro started, he had kept the dynamic level of the idée fixe breathtakingly soft, but at the repeat it was allowed a more saturated tone–just the kind of creative differentiation that repeats are, in part, there to permit. Expression was as finely served as form, culminating in a bloodcurdling performance of the concluding Witches’ Sabbath.

There were, for me, only two minor disappointments. In an otherwise compelling reading of the second movement, where Slatkin elected not to include the solo cornet part that Berlioz added to the score after the symphony’s completion, I missed the sleazily creamy tone it can add to the orchestral texture. And his delivery of the March to the Scaffold was surprisingly straight-laced: Seth Krimsky and his bassoon section were suitably piquant and incisive, and the brasses in general played brilliantly, but one or two of the bass trombone’s more raucous moments made little effect.

Such details, however, scarcely damaged the impact of this superb performance. Competence is no mean virtue. But the qualities that marked this concert were of a higher order, and demonstrated what a wonderful conductor Slatkin has become in his full maturity.

Bernard Jacobson


^{Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page}