SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven: Susan Graham (soprano), Christian Zacharias (conductor and keyboard), Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 29.10.2010 (LV)

 

C.P.E. Bach: Piano Concerto in D minor

Mozart: Concert aria, "Ch'io mi scordi di te," K. 505

Beethoven: Suite from The Creatures of Prometheus

For this Casual Concert offered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, listeners streamed into Walt Disney Concert Hall wearing all sorts of “casual” dress, including masks. (I think some were intended as Halloween costumes, but in Los Angeles you can never be sure.) Unfortunately, there were no kids as far as I could see, and lots of empty seats.

On paper, the program was great. C.P.E. Bach's D-minor keyboard concerto remains woefully under-played and under-recorded, and it must have been overwhelming for any music lovers who were hearing it for the first time (which was probably 99% of the audience). Filled with passion and trenchant emotion, it probably works best when it sounds like it's a big piece. Forty years ago, the defining recording was with harpsichordist Werner Smigelski and the Berlin Philharmonic, on an EMI LP called quaintly, “Music from the Court of Frederick the Great." The LP included a harmless Sinfonia in D by the great Frederick himself, an excerpt from Graun's Montezuma sung by a young Pilar Lorengar, and a Quantz flute concerto played by Karl-Heinz Zoeller who along with Fritz Wunderlich made Bohm's DG recording of The Magic Flute an essential Mozart experience. I still have that recording, valuable for its perspective; after more than forty years, it's quite extraordinary to hear how the approach to early music has changed.

There is no doubt that Christian Zacharias is among the most imaginative of musicians, in any music, before or after Mozart. Who can forget his performances with this same orchestra in 2007, or his superlative recordings of the Mozart piano concertos (one complete for EMI, one underway for MDG)? Or consider the EMI recording of 320 different performances of the same Scarlatti sonata (K. 55), which for many years Zacharias played as an encore after every recital (and may still do), taped from performances between 1973 and 1994, in venues as diverse as Baden-Baden, Linz, Paris (more than once), Tokyo and Amsterdam.

Here, however, and to the music's loss, Zacharias tried to get away with a hybrid approach: reduced strings, and grand piano with a rather blowzy tone, except when he focused in on some detail or one of the many mini-cadenzas he added (the only positive benefit from this experienced C.P.E. Bach listener's point of view). And the Philharmonic strings, no matter how hard they tried, could never meet the demands of the composer and the conductor. The result was even more angular and dysfunctional than C.P.E. Bach usually is, and never gripped the audience to make them stand and roar at the end. Maybe the dampening spirit came from its being a “Casual Concert” in the first place.

Susan Graham, who came on to sing the great Mozart aria composed for the singer who debuted Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro, never quite got in synch. The performance was pure but porcelain, with very little physical excitement. Tempos were slow and moldy, succumbing to the trap of the piano obbligato scene, which is much more difficult to insert than it seems. Zacharias's playing was not inspired. Graham's stage manner was uneasy, uncomfortable. Still, Casual Concert or not, if you have a great soprano like Graham, the audience deserved to hear more of her. They could have easily cut the Beethoven which is, let's face it, remarkably bad music, with its usual mix of a few tiny pleasures and mostly down time. The pleasures included solo moments for harp, cello, and basset horn, and one of the many sightings in Beethoven's music of the so-called "Eroica" theme. But in remarkably bad music, even remarkably gorgeous woodwinds and remarkably earnest strings could never quite give Zacharias the energy and whirling momentum he was asking for.

The concert was introduced by principal violist Carrie Dennis, who did an adorable Bridget Jones impression—if Bridget had been a model-slim and pretty violist. Snatching her away from the Berlin Philharmonic was one of the best personnel moves the Los Angeles orchestra has ever made.

Laurence Vittes