SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Schwantner, Foote, Brahms, and Prokofiev: Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Maria Larionoff, violin; Yefim Bronfman, piano; Seattle Symphony; Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 24.9.2010 (BJ)

The Gund/Simonyi Farewell Commissions, designed as a tribute to Gerard Schwarz in his 26th and last season as music director of the Seattle Symphony, were announced as consisting of “18 short works.” But after just two of the results have been unveiled, and allowing for further possible modification as the series progresses, that description must already be changed to “17 short works and Joseph Schwantner’s The Poet’s Hour.”

I feared for a time, as this “Soliloquy for violin and strings,” subtitled Reflections on Thoreau, pursued its prolix course, that the composer might prove to be taking the word “hour” seriously, but mercifully an end came after not much more than a quarter of that time. Schwantner says “the music is essentially lyrical and elegiac.” There are certainly passages justifying that description, though they tend to sound like a variant of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, only bereft of that work’s inspiration. The best thing in The Poet’s Hour was an extended section, managed with impressive skill, that built up from a little three-note ostinato for bass strings to a full string tutti and then sank back down again. But through what felt like most of its length, the new piece presented a great deal of energetic but jejune multiple stopping–which, indeed, like the quieter sections, the orchestra’s concertmaster Maria Larionoff played with all her familiar artistry and technical aplomb.

At the other end of the program came Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. In rather similar fashion, this seems to me a work reminiscent of Macbeth’s description of life as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Again similarly, the solo part was played for all it’s worth by Yefim Bronfman. What George Bernard Shaw would have called his “marksmanship” was, as ever, close to impeccable. I have never found him to be a notably poetic pianist, nor his tone to be especially beguiling, but he is a good match for a concerto that makes no demands in such realms of expression, and this was a serviceable performance, supported by some crackerjack contributions from the orchestra.

It was left, then, for the two central works on the program to provide the solid musical satisfactions of the afternoon. Coming on the heels of Schwantner’s ramblings, Arthur Foote’s Francesca da Rimini, characterized by its composer as a “symphonic prologue,” immediately imposed a welcome sense of purposefulness in harmony, texture, and rhythmic design. The New England composer’s life-span, from 1853 to 1937, closely paralleled Elgar’s, and though his gift is not on his English contemporary’s level, this roughly 15-minute piece contains passages of near-Elgarian succulence and grace.

Gerard Schwarz knows the work inside out, having not long ago included it in a Naxos CD devoted to Foote’s music. He gave it a performance both rousing and sensitive, and the same could be said for his reading of Brahms’s Third Symphony–an interesting juxtaposition with the Foote, since both works unconventionally end quietly.

Brahms gave the principal horn many wonderful solos in all four of his symphonies, and an orchestra that has John Cerminaro to play them is bound to achieve some correspondingly beautiful results in performing any of them. Schwarz favors richly saturated textures in his Brahms. Attention to detail in the middle of the texture is in itself a highly desirable thing, but taken to extremes it can somewhat obscure the principal melodic line. This Third Symphony performance was better suited to please experienced listeners than neophytes: if you are very familiar with the work, you know just what to listen for at any particular point, whereas someone hearing the music for the first time might have been forgiven for being puzzled now and then about what exactly was going on.

The two greatest performances of Brahms Three I can remember hearing (aside, I need hardly add, from Furtwängler’s classic recordings) were conducted by Victor de Sabata, more than half a century ago, and by Riccardo Muti more recently. By the side of those conductors’ often thrilling dynamism and their penchant for tempo modification, Schwarz’s direction of the work could be thought a shade sober-sided. The moment when, after the first-movement exposition repeat, the codetta theme takes us by the scruff of the neck and debouches into the development section might well, I felt, have used a touch more impulsiveness.

Despite these reservations, however, there was much to enjoy, from those poignantly lonely-sounding horn solos, by way of some exquisitely phrased woodwind passages, to the clean and lustrous tone of the strings. The slow movement was shaped with a fine sense of flow, its mysterious subordinate theme–the figure that grows into so majestic a statement in the finale–entering with the utmost delicacy and stealth. The intermezzo that stands third was full of character, and its central climax, which comes against all expectation with a moment of utter quietude, was masterful in its hush. And the finale itself was cogently organized, its subtle shifts of pulse placed around a firmly projected basic tempo. It was not the most imaginative performance of the symphony you could ask for, but it was a compellingly perceptive one, and it ended with due eloquence and solemnity.

Bernard Jacobson