New York Philharmonic: Szymanowski Symphonie Concertante

This concert was not on my regularly subscription series.  I got a single ticket out of eagerness to hear, at last, a real live performance of Karol Szymanowski's Symphonie Concertante.  I've had a special interest in Szymanowski ever since I read Artur Rubinstein's memoirs.  Rubinstein was a good friend of the composer, and related the story of Szymanowski's "coming out" as a gay man after years of despondency about his sexuality.  Unfortunately, he did not have long to live after that, as tuberculosis carried him off at 55 in 1937.  The Symphonie Concertante is "late" Szymanowski, composed in 1932 as a concert vehicle for the composer, who was a notable pianist.  But he did not intend to write a full-blown concerto, rather a symphonic work in the which the solo piano had a substantial role.  In the end, the piece turned out neither fish nor fowl.  There is too much for the pianist to do of a virtuosic nature for it to be considered a symphony with obbligato piano, and yet too little that is really flashy to attract the virtuosi who make a career of playing piano concerti with orchestra.  And Szymanowski's music has not travelled well outside eastern Europe, so we don't get to hear much of it.  Quite an opportunity, then, not fully realized on this occasion.

But my heart sank as Emanuel Ax walked on the stage with the piano score under his arm.  This could mean that the performances with the Philharmonic were a "one off," somebody asked him to learn the piece to play it in these concerts.  Or, even if not, that this was a piece that Ax had not internalized to the degree of really knowing it intimately, so what kind of performance could we expect?  I found the performance to be underpowered, undercharacterized.  Not that this is some great masterpiece, but I have accumulated many recordings of it in my collection and most are more exciting that what I heard last night, although the Philharmonic is far and away the best orchestra I've heard compared to the recordings.  For now I'll have to remain content with the recorded work of Andsnes or Rubinstein or Blumental in this piece and hope that another chance to hear it live with a pianist who has "lived in" to the piece more...  It's not that there was anything actively wrong with the performance, just that there was not the kind of really dedicated advocacy from piano and podium that this piece needs to succeed fully with an audience.

Ax also performed the Richard Strauss Burleske for Piano and Orchestra, a work that he had by heart and clearly feels great affection for, which was communicated well in this performance.  Maazel and the orchestra were with him every step of the way.

The concert began with another unfolding chapter in the Philharmonic's somewhat misguided saga to present the six J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concerti this season.  OK, you have a harpsichord on stage, but I could barely hear it in the outer movements, where a small orchestral string body of modern instruments pretty much made the harpsichord superfluous and inaudible.  The soloists were all fine, if not Baroque stylists, and of course the solo trumpet of Philip Smith was technically superb, as expected, although oboe soloist Liang Wang made the most impression on me with his wonderfully singing tone.  It was touching to see Smith's younger trumpet section colleagues sitting up in the orchestra's box on the second tier to watch their leader do his thing.  They seemed fully absorbed. Sheryl Staples was the fine violin soloist.  Robert Langevin's flute was excellent when audible, but the flute was a bit outbalanced at times by the oboe and/or trumpet in the outer movements.  I was startled when Maazel conducted the second movement.  Unlike the outer fast movements, which require the participation of the orchestra, the central slower movement is chamber music, three of the soloists (the trumpeter stands silently) playing a delicate number with basso continuo of cello and harpsichord.  There is no need for conducting this; the conductor just gets in the way and the players should be interacting and moving forward spontaneously as chamber musicians.  This performance felt terribly stilted, too heavily anchored to the bar lines.  I frequently feel when hearing this movement that something is missing, as if we are being presented with an elegant accompaniment to a missing them...  As I said at the outset, the idea of presenting the Brandenburgs in this format is a bit misguided.  It would make more sense to do the Orchestral Suites using this orchestra...

Finally, after intermission, we had Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition.  This was in most ways the most superbly played piece of the evening.  With Smith having the rest of the concert off after his stratospheric doings in the Bach, the Philharmonic's talented young Associate Principal Trumpeter Matthew Muckey got to show off his chops and scored a big success in a piece that provides numerous opportunities for the solo trumpet to shine.  But then almost all the Philharmonic soloists shown in this piece, not least the mystery soloist, playing Alto Saxophone in "The Old Castle" movement with great flare, but utterly nameless in the program book.  He should sue...  The one soloist who had difficulties last night was principal Hornist Philip Myers, whose big solo in the second Promenade sounded kind of wobbly, and who managed to actually enounter that rare problem of a note not sounding at a crucial moment.  It happens with the horn, sometimes, but you don't expect to hear it at an exposed moment in a Philharmonic concert.  Myers is one of my heroes in this orchestra, so it was painful to hear.  I'm sure he'll have lots of opportunities to redeem himself in the weeks ahead.

My one beef about this performance of Pictures was the way that Lorin Maazel indulged his tendency towards excessive interventionism.  This was most evident in the Great Gate at Kiev, the grand finale.  The score indicates a few brief pauses to mark major changeds in character of the music, alternating the pompous Great Gate music with a solemn Russian Orthodox chorale, but Maazel turned some of them into huge grand pauses breaking up the flow of the music and overemphasizing the monumentalism.  This reached its most gross lapse of taste in the final bars, dreadfully stretched out and rendered quite ugly -- in a manner Ravel, a man of great refinement, would not have wanted -- with a loud, clangorous bell overwhelming the orchestral texture.  These moments aside, though, it was a rare pleasure to hear such a sumptuous rendition of Ravel's orchestration, which revealed so many interesting instrumental combinations and inventive touches in the hands of the Philharmonic virtuosi.

So, a very mixed verdict on this concert.  I'm glad to have heard the Szymanowski live, but hope nobody present formed a firm opinion about the piece based on this performance.  And I'm delighted to have heard this rendition of Pictures for its sound and virtuosity, even though I found some of the conductor's shenanigans detracting a bit from my enjoyment.

Comments

[caprice]

I'll have to defer to your experience with the Szymanowski--I'd never heard it before, even recorded. But otherwise I agree with your observations 100%--especially about the Pictures. I thought Maazel would never finish it.

[Art Leonard]

Yeah, the Times critic suggested in this morning's paper that Maazel seemed to lose interest in Pictures about half way through. I don't think so, myself, but I thought Baba Yaga was too slow and the Great Gate was dragged out unmercifully with those interpolated pauses...