The
first two months of 2004 have presented Philadelphia
concert-goers with a fascinating cavalcade
of conductors intimately associated with their
orchestra. First of all, recent incumbent
music director Wolfgang Sawallisch was on
the podium for two weeks. He was followed
by the one that got away – Sir Simon Rattle,
whom the management pursued with perhaps more
enthusiasm than discretion when it began its
search for Sawallisch’s successor; Rattle
has nevertheless remained on cordial terms
with the orchestra, turning almost into a
sort of unofficial principal guest conductor,
and he was back towards the end of January
for another three-week stint. Next came Christoph
Eschenbach, who – warmly praised by Rattle
himself – took over the leadership last September,
and who led off his ambitiously programmed
five-season Mahler festival with the biggest
of all the composer’s symphonies, the Third,
surrounding it with a variety of stimulating
ancillary events.
Sawallisch’s
two programs comprised first the Bruckner
Fifth Symphony and then Beethoven’s Fourth
together with that composer’s complete incidental
music to Egmont. He conducted from
a sitting position, and looked somewhat frail.
This did not prevent a clear representation
of his familiar conducting characteristics,
which, centered as they are on a fairly dispassionate
interpretative approach and a disinclination
for extremes in such spheres as dynamic, I
personally find less than compelling. The
fugal passages in Bruckner’s compendious finale,
in particular, betrayed Sawallisch’s curious
tendency to sound hurried even while arguably
pacing the music too slowly – even his widely
admired Strauss seems to me seriously lacking
in amplitude and sheer breadth. Nor were the
two Beethoven works, neither of which started
quite together, much more impressive. Still,
Sawallisch’s many admirers obviously enjoyed
themselves, especially those who were hearing
Bruckner’s Fifth for the first time and were
understandably bowled over by the work itself,
and their affection for the 80-year-old German
conductor was evident in the warmth of the
ovations that greeted each performance.
Rattle
in his turn offered repertoire ranging from
Chopin and Wagner, by way of several other
late 19th and early 20th
century composers, to Messiaen (another emphatic
focus of Eschenbach’s first season as music
director) and Hans Werner Henze. The latter
was represented, in the first Rattle week,
by the United States premiere of his Tenth
Symphony, which is full of typically alluring
Henze-esque sonorities and textures, but on
first acquaintance (and without benefit of
score) I found somewhat impenetrable in terms
of formal structure; as a keen admirer of
the composer, I hope to make more of the piece
on repeated hearings. This program ended with
the Brahms Second Symphony – and thereby hangs
a tale. The Philadelphians sounded curiously
out of sorts in what emerged as a rather perfunctory
reading, short both of musical illumination
and of the strength of bass sonorities essential
in Brahms. It so happened that, just a few
days later, an easy 100-mile journey northwards
provided the chance to hear that same symphony
under the baton of Sawallisch’s predecessor,
Riccardo Muti, who, since leaving Philadelphia
in 1992, has been taken warmly into the affections
of the New York Philharmonic and its audiences.
Preceding the work with a delectable, playfully
nuanced Schubert Rosamunde overture
and a revelatory group of Mozart arias superbly
sung by Thomas Quasthoff, Muti showed again
what a magnificent Brahmsian he is. And it
was particularly revealing to hear his treatment
of the first movement’s exposition repeat
(which Rattle did not observe), as he cast
new light on the material by selecting different
facets for emphasis the second time around
– which is, after all, a large part of the
purpose of repeats in general.
Philadelphia’s
other two weeks of Rattle found conductor
and orchestra happily restored to their collaborative
best. A powerful reading of the Sibelius Second
Symphony was the highlight of their second
program, the actual sound (heard from almost
exactly the same seats) inexplicably transformed
from the anemic quality it had shown in Brahms.
An all-French concluding program featured
Rinat Shaham in a sensuous and stylish performance
of Ravel’s Shéhérazade
(though this gifted young mezzo would do well
to beware of excessive swaying and gesturing
on the concert platform if she wants to avoid
undermining vocal security and interpretative
concentration) and finished with the local
premiere of Messiaen’s last orchestral work,
Éclairs sur l’Au-delà.
I am probably in a minority in finding this
to be one of the late master’s less attractive
large-scale pieces. There are moments of magic,
but also too many long stretches of bald chord-progressions
unadorned by the slightest trace of contrapuntal
interest. But it was played up to the hilt,
with some climaxes awesome enough to set even
a sceptic’s nerves tingling.
For
me, it is peculiarly touching, three decades
after I served on the panel of judges for
the John Player Conducting Competition and
thus had the luck to play a part in launching
the then 19-year-old Rattle’s career, to see
the enthusiasts in the Kimmel Center’s spacious
lobby lining up for the last-minute ticket
rush to hear the world-renowned maestro he
has now become. A couple of weeks later, there
were even more fans on hand waiting patiently
on the chance of hearing Christoph Eschenbach
set out on his Mahler exploration – the most
convincing answer to any doubts I may have
had about whether the world really needed
another Mahler festival. This one had actually
started with a symposium, open free to the
public, for which the management had enterprisingly
flown over from Paris the greatest living
Mahler expert, Henry-Louis de La Grange, author
of a multi-volume biography of the composer,
who both in the symposium and in a richly
detailed pre-concert talk before the Third
Symphony performances demonstrated wit, charm,
and meticulous scholarship in an equilibrium
that is today sadly rare.
It is
good to be able to report that the actual
performance of the Third Symphony was of an
equally comprehensive excellence. I should
not be fulfilling my critical responsibilities
if I failed to mention that, while beautifully
played, the trumpet that did service for the
offstage post-horn in the third movement was
not a really satisfactory substitute for that
difficult but romantic instrument. For the
rest, however, Eschenbach was as impeccable
as he was passionate. He paced the work with
total mastery and conviction, the orchestra
(together with the American Boychoir and the
women of the Philadelphia Singers Chorale)
gave its all, and the audience greeted their
combined efforts with a nearly ten-minute-long
ovation of un-Philadelphian rapture and abandon.
The mezzo-soprano soloist too, Lorraine Hunt
Lieberson, was marvelously secure and sumptuous
of tone. As if all this was not enough, she
and Eschenbach came back on stage after a
mere few minutes’ rest for another of the
music director’s innovations, which he brought
with him from his previous post as music director
of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s summer
festival at Ravinia – a postlude recital,
which on this occasion featured two songs
each by Mozart, Schumann, and Brahms. Understandably
fractionally less well sung than the Mahler
had been, it was still balm to the ears and
the heart, embracing as it did such great
Lieder as "Abendempfindung an Laura,"
"Widmung," and "Von ewiger
Liebe," and – in the Mozart above all
– Eschenbach showed that his touch as a pianist
remains at once as delicate and as firm as
his way with the baton.
Bernard Jacobson
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