Dohnányi conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra (2nd review)

Selling great music is necessary only if education fails. The failure to provide access to music in our schools is an ever-deepening tragedy, since music nurtures the spirit as nothing else can.

Mozart may not be for everyone, but everyone should have the opportunity to experience him, and not in the cradle— "Baby Mozart" is exactly the opposite of what music education should mean.

The Western world's major orchestras were all formed in the heyday of bourgeois culture, when a broader audience and larger musical ensembles emerged together. Long-playing records and classical music stations, like the eight I grew up listening to in New York, greatly expanded access and repertory, but at the cost of home musical instruction and performance that was considered de rigueur in upper-middle-class households at one time. The growth of public education—
public schools actually did educate once— compensated in part, and at least potentially brought exposure to music within everyone's reach.

Marketing Yannick

That America's great orchestras now struggle for existence is part of the larger tragedy of our democratic culture. Conductors have frequently enough been showmen, but now they're required to be salesmen too, and what they sell first of all is themselves.

Leonard Bernstein was a showman and instinctively a salesman, but also an educator: that is, someone who voluntarily shared passion for his subject. Riccardo Muti possessed some of those same qualities, but he was never happy about being part of the product he was selling, or "selling" in general. He returned to Europe because he sensed the decline of public culture in the U.S., and when he returned it was to lead not a better orchestra but an orchestra in a city— Chicago— that better supported it.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin demonstrates evident strengths as a musician, but the relentless marketing of his image can do no good. It's certainly not doing any good to the repertory he conducts.

I was interested to hear Nézet-Séguin's Rite of Spring, which he had programmed with an unfamiliar early Haydn symphony and Schumann's Spring Symphony. At the last minute, however, a string of Stokowski lollipops was substituted for the latter two works, and to this was added the visual distractions, including a trapeze act, that vulgarized the Stravinsky performance as well.

I've long since given up the circus. I decided to pass.

Refreshed chestnuts

Last week, quite unheralded, the 83-year-old Christoph von Dohnányi came to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra. The program contained two venerable chestnuts: the Mozart D minor Piano Concerto No. 20, K. 466, and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. They're chestnuts, that is, in the hands of lesser musicians, but full of fresh revelation and delight when led by a maestro who knows and loves the scores down to their last note, and takes joy in bringing them to life.

These two works made a full program, but Dohnányi also brought a novelty: Witold Lutoslawski's Funeral Music of 1958, a quarter-hour work for strings that, with its four linked sections, almost constitutes a one-movement symphony. More correctly, the work's Polish title is Music of Mourning, and I don't know why it doesn't bear that title in English, unless it's to avoid confusion with Paul Hindemith's Trauermusik.

Eastern Europe's great thaw

It was occasioned as a memorial to Béla BartÓ³k, although it wasn't begun until nine years after BartÓ³k's death. One senses that a good deal more than its dedicatory subject was on the composer's mind; like Krzysztof Penderecki's near-contemporary Threnody, Lutoslawski's work speaks to a more universal sense of tragedy, and belongs to the cultural thaw then giving East European artists their first freedom to deal with World War II and its aftermath. Among other things, that thaw provided an opportunity to compose serial music for the first time— although Lutoslawski, like Berg, used his tone rows to write in a post-Romantic idiom.

(Stravinsky, too, belatedly came to terms with Schoenberg at the same time, or rather showed how serialism could reinvigorate— and thus be incorporated in— his personal style.)

At all events, Funeral Music, or Muzyka zalobna if you'll prefer, is an expressive, densely worked piece that showed off the full range of the Philadelphia strings, from ghostly whisperings to full-throated declamation. In the climactic Apogeum section it produced some of the most sheerly ravishing sound I've ever heard, even from this Orchestra.

Secure but not showy

The pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, a frequent guest under the late Wolfgang Sawallisch, accompanied Dohnányi in the Mozart. In its way, the 20th Concerto is as revolutionary a work as Beethoven's Eroica, with its foreshadowings of the Romantic piano concerto. But this performance stressed the work's classical balance.

Buchbinder is not a showy talent, but he is a very secure one, and with a minimum of tempo or dynamic change he nailed the score, with Dohnányi and the Orchestra in full accord. The way to underline the genuine innovation in a familiar work is precisely to play it within the tradition from which it emerged, and so both soloist and conductor proceeded, exchanging encouraging nods from time to time and plainly delighting in the results, as did the audience.

Beethoven in context

For Beethoven, Dohnányi pared down his forces, placing cellos and basses to his left. Here too, without any period instrument sermonizing, the music was placed back in its early-19th-Century context, again with the result that its extraordinary radicalism was foregrounded without being in the least pushed. Textures were clear, rhythms firm, entrances sharp, with Christopher Deviney's percussion strokes particularly incisive. The entire score seemed freshly minted.

No one, of course, will ever have the actual experience of hearing the Eroica with the ears of its first audience in 1805, for whom it would— could its full import have been grasped at once— have been a veritably Copernican experience. But it took the youth of an octogenarian to remind us of the youth of this evergreen giant.

The near-capacity crowd— a happy sight— responded with a standing ovation that reflected both pleasure and appreciation. Maybe the way to keep great music alive is simply to play it as well as this?

As I was leaving the hall, a woman behind me exclaimed, "That was music!" Yes, ma'am. It was.♦


To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here.
To read a related comment by Dan Rottenberg, click here.