Gilbert conducts the Orchestra (2nd review)

Expectations turned upside down

BEERI MOALEM

The slew on the Philadelphia Orchestra's February 9 program, I must admit, looked a little bit scary— even for me, a composer and lover of new music: Hillborg, whom I’d never heard of before; Bartok, whom I fearfully respect as one should regard a brave and formidable foe; and Nielsen, whose music I once played— an experience I do not recall with fondness. I suspect that the majority of listeners and musicians hold roughly the same set of expectations that I did about these three composers: suspicious cluelessness about the still-living Hillborg, wary awe for Bartok, and mild indifference for the famous Dane, Carl Nielsen.

It would not suffice to say that my expectations were turned upside down by this concert.

The concert began with Swedish composer Anders Hillborg's Exquisite Corpse. The witty title refers to a game invented by the Dadaists in which people complete each other's sentences without knowing all of what came before. (Refer to the program notes for more detail.) The results either generate meaningless random fragments, or create crazy new combinations that with society's preconditioning, we would never come up with by ourselves. Thus the process can be a waste of time, or a sudden expansion of new possibilities and an artistic liberation.

Hillborg cheated a little bit— a true Exquisite Corpse requires at least two players— but he maintained the basic gist of using a wide variety of unrelated ideas. The brilliance of the piece is that besides the individual novelty of each unrelated section, the "random" episodes fit remarkably well with each other, and achieve a balance of characters. Somehow, I suspect that this game of chance was rigged!

Dissonance that’s not unpleasant

The piece begins with a sequence that flowers like a bud in time-lapse animation. A single flute sustains a solitary note, is joined by its two peers on the same note, and is then joined by three oboes and three clarinets to form iridescent tone clusters that move through the overtone series with a crystalline clarity. The upper woodwinds of the Philadelphia Orchestra performed this difficult section with almost perfect intonation. The beats (clashes of sound waves in dissonant chords) fluttered against each other evenly, so that the "dissonance" was not at all unpleasant.

Hillborg displays his orchestrational sensitivity by transitioning from the high wind section to the high strings with the help of harp flourishes. The collage thus passed gracefully from genre to genre, with the more abrupt transitions wielding a strong dramatic effect.

The piece reached a very intense climax as the percussion battery took over Verizon Hall. Conductor Alan Gilbert assumed a fencing stance, pointing his shoulder to the orchestra, knees slightly bent, slashing his rapier at the drummers in the back. Bongos, bass drums, timpani and an array of other bangables joined forces in an African-sounding rhythm frenzy.

The piece eventually dies back down, and concludes with echoes of Sibelius and an almost Romantic style elegy that doesn't fade out completely— the sound was abruptly cut off in mezzo-piano. The piece's title and its background story may be appropriate for its variety and allusions to other composers, but the dramatic arch is too good to be blind or random.

Last time I heard the Bartok Sonata for two pianos and percussion, a piano string snapped. I believe it was a B-flat. From then on, whenever the pianist hit that note, an unpleasant zing would buzz and rattle. It was wonderful.

The Axes needed some axes

There was no danger of anything breaking at this concert, however. Emmanuel Ax and Yoko Nazaki are probably more at home with the piano arias of Chopin, or the chamber music of Beethoven and Brahms, for which Ax has won Grammy Awards. But Bartok's Sonata with Percussion is a far cry from the Romantics. This isn’t Chopin, where one can hold down the pedal and wallow in beautiful harmonies and melodies. Bartok realized that the piano is at its essence a percussion instrument (as Allen Krantz put it in the pre-concert conversation, "Let's bang on it!"), and therefore paired it with its stick-stricken cousins.

Principal timpanist Don S. Liuzzi joined forces with principal percussionist Christopher Deviney, as the two outshone their pianist counterparts. Deviney's xylophone solos in particular were jarring and cut right through. The timpani playing was also very good— ranging from the eerily atmospheric to dance-inducing.

The pianos, however, seemed lost. The addition of an orchestral accompaniment to an already dense sonata makes navigation difficult, and the pianos were sometimes inaudible under the orchestra. Fingers moved and hammers struck strings, but no sound reached my ears on the third tier. The couple could have used a little more vertical motion and manual labor to axe their way through the texture.

Fiendish violin runs

I thank Maestro Gilbert for bringing us Nielsen's Second Symphony, composed in 1901 but never before played by the Philadelphia Orchestra. The piece fits an almost programmatic musical setting of the ancient Greeks' medical system into the absolutist and established classical symphonic structure of the 18th Century. The piece is somewhat neo-Classical in feel, but not self-consciously so. The form and expression feel natural and fitting to their subject.

The first movement, the choleric allegro— suffering from an excess of yellow bile and resulting in lots of passion but prone to anger— was expressed with rushed chords and fiendish runs for the violinists, who played the heck out of them. The phlegmatic allegro, a paradoxically tired but still humorous scherzo, also captured the sickly character well. Lazy pizzicati are difficult to play together, but Gilbert used his experience as a professional string player to dictate the plucks with charm as well as precision. Gilbert went on to wring plenty of emotion out of the Melancholic Andante, and plenty of heart-pumping action in the Sanguine Allegro. It was a marvelous performance of an overlooked but masterful symphony.

Gilbert was recently snagged by the New York Philharmonic to serve as its music director beginning in 2009-2010. Apparently he is in high demand and the New Yorkers wanted to sign him early before someone else did. Reportedly, the musicians of the Philharmonic are singing the maestro's praise even off the stage, something orchestra pros don’t yield lightly. Gilbert remained in Philly to conduct the Curtis Orchestra on Monday night with another Nielsen Symphony. I can't wait to hear him again.



To read another review by Dan Coren, click here.
To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.