Learning to love Christoph Eschenbach

DAN COREN

I first heard the Philadelphia Orchestra in the fall of 1969, from discount seats directly below the Academy of Music’s podium. I had just joined Penn's music department, where Eugene Ormandy was held in disdain by many of my new colleagues and, I was assured, by most of the Orchestra's musicians as well. Snotty New Yorker that I was, fresh from graduate school at Berkeley, I was only too receptive to this view.

That afternoon, Ormandy led a memorably dreary performance of Haydn’s “Lord Nelson” Mass. The first violins, all males, most of them past 40, responded to Ormandy’s bland, perfunctory conducting with all the enthusiasm of the union waiters at Old Original Bookbinder’s. Over the next ten years, I attended very few concerts at the Academy of Music.

Looking back at it now, I see the error of my ways. The image of Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing in the Academy was, of course – like Bookbinders — a symbol of civic pride, as much a part of Philadelphia’s identity as Independence Hall or Billy Penn’s statue. But while Bookbinder’s was a truly ghastly restaurant, the paradigm of tourist traps, the Orchestra under Ormandy was, my experience that day aside, one of the greatest in the world.

Ormandy stayed on for another decade, a beloved figure playing to full houses, leading dependably lush performances of Beethoven, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff. He represented stability as much as staid complacency. Sniping at him was a luxury, a measure of how easy it was for Philadelphia music lovers to take it all for granted.

The Orchestra’s troubles have steadily increased since Ormandy’s departure. In recent years, I’ve had the sense that we’ve been experiencing something like one of the ecological disasters described in Jared Diamond’s Collapse, witnessing the steady erosion of the cultural topsoil that sustains a symphony orchestra, leaving increasingly large expanses of unoccupied bright red upholstery in Verizon Hall.

But it certainly didn’t seem that way when Riccardo Muti arrived in 1980, at which time the trademark richness of the Orchestra under Ormandy was replaced by clarity and passion, and Ormandy’s grandfatherly persona was replaced by what you would have gotten if you’d called central casting and said, “Send me a Maestro. And make him sexy.”

After just 12 years (a mere fraction of Ormandy’s 44-year tenure), Muti was gone, leaving plenty of hurt feelings in his wake. Rather than enjoy his glamorous super-star image, Muti scolded us for failing to take him or our music seriously enough. (I’m sure he meant it, but it was a bit as if Marilyn Monroe had complained that we weren’t paying enough attention to her singing.) And he told us that the Academy of Music really wasn’t a very good concert hall – a criticism that rankled all the more for being correct.

I’m still trying to decide how great a conductor Muti really was. At his concerts, Muti’s physical presence was so strong that it was hard to sort out one’s experience of the music from one’s experience of watching him extracting it from the Orchestra. But toward the end of his tenure, I began to have my doubts.

One evening, I turned on my car radio on in the middle of a performance of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony. It was the development section of the slow second movement, one of the most miraculously delicate and complicated passages ever composed. On this occasion, however, I was struck more by the bad intonation of the winds and the sloppiness of the ensemble than I was by the beauty of the music. It was disillusioning to find out that I was listening to Muti conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra. By the end of his tenure, the Orchestra had – at least by the Olympian standards of its stature and reputation – begun to sound a little frayed around the edges.

My impression of Muti’s successor, Wolfgang Sawallisch, was, more than anything else, formed by the 45 minutes I spent interviewing him in October of 1993 while I was writing for Seven Arts magazine. More than what Sawallisch said, it is the grip of his handshake that I still remember. I have rarely met a man who radiated such magisterial authority, and I couldn’t help but hear the same qualities in his performances. Far from being the unassuming professorial care-taker that he was sometimes perceived to be, Sawallisch was in many ways the strongest leader the Orchestra has had.

I’m not alone in this opinion. If you click on here, you will find an extraordinary piece by Robin Mitchell-Boyask of Temple University, written for musicweb-international.com just before the Orchestra’s move to Verizon Hall in 2000.

Here’s an excerpt: “Sawallisch has rebuilt this group into an ensemble with few peers. …[He] found in the first few years of his directorship the need to do some house-cleaning because Muti had been reluctant to make some hard personnel decisions, and the process was a bit ugly, but he has now replaced almost a third of the players. He has chosen with impeccable taste; it is extremely difficult to fault his judgment with any of the more prominent hires. …This might be the best version of the Philadelphia Orchestra yet. It is thus a shame that so few people get to hear it. Whoever leads the musicians next will owe his predecessor an enormous debt.”

Mitchell-Boyask also speculates at length on Sawallisch’s possible successor, but his only mention of the man who actually got the job lurks in this ominous sentence:

“When the likes of Christoph Eschenbach are pushed for big American posts , . . . it is clear that decisions are not being made on purely musical criteria.”

Eschenbach came into a difficult situation: The Orchestra had been struggling to keep its subscriber base for some time, even before the move to Verizon Hall; he was not on very many people's wish lists; and the threat of a strike by the Orchestra’s musicians was a continuing source of tension.

So how has he done?

Well, here I am again at a performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra 36 years after that afternoon at the Academy. I am sitting in excellent seats in a beautiful new concert hall. The audience seems to be equally distributed in age from the elderly to teen-agers.

My seats give me a particularly good view of the eight string players sitting in a semi-circle at the conductor’s feet. Half of them are women – some of them very young women indeed – and all of them are playing with the passionate enthusiasm of conservatory students. When the performance is over, there are several long, heartfelt curtain calls.

It almost sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Who would have thought that one of the most challenging, dark, complicated works of the symphonic literature would hold the rapt attention of a nearly full house? Yet this is a description of Eschenbach’s November 12th performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

As an Orchestra subscriber, I’ve now heard Eschenbach in performance several times. The best measure for me of his success is that the music he performs – not the conducting in itself, the music -- stays with me for days afterwards. I can still call up in my imagination Eschenbach’s hypnotic, incantational reading of the slow movement of Dvorak’s Eighth, and the maelstrom of the finale of the Mahler is still knocking around in my head.

Now here are some excerpts from the Inquirer’s David Patrick Stearns review of that same concert.

“Whether Eschenbach is reacting to a less neurotic view of Mahler or simply coming to terms with the emotional limitations of the Philadelphia Orchestra (which definitely lurk behind that glamorous sound), he didn't go to the extremes he has enjoyed with the piece in years past, in a reigned-in”— the Inquirer’s spelling!— “strategically sound performance. . . .
“The right pieces were mostly there. Heat was reasonably high. Yet at no point did the music feel threatening. And as someone who values Eschenbach's sense of thoughtful provocation, I hope his more extreme days aren't ending.”

If you ever wanted an illustration of damning with faint praise, here it is. And what does it mean to discuss the “emotional limitations” of a group of a hundred musicians? More often than not, I enjoy Stearns’s reviews, but this is simply awful, tepid writing— a classic example of music-critic bullshit rhetoric.

Nevertheless, if you've been reading the Inquirer's music reviews for the past two years, you know that the most significant thing about this review is who didn't write it. Throughout Eschenbach's first two seasons, he has been under constant attack from the Inquirer's other music critic, Peter Dobrin. Agreed, Eschenbach's characteristic use of flexible tempos as an expressive device is not to everybody's taste, but it seems to drive Dobrin into an apoplectic rage.

I know that Dobrin has upset at least some members of Orchestra management in the same way that Howard Eskin angers the Phillies' front office, so I find it suspicious that this season, the Inquirer seems to have taken Dobrin off the Eschenbach beat. Too bad; such a passionate performance could have done with an equally passionate review.

I've now heard Eschenbach in performance several times. The best measure for me of his success is that the music he performs "“ not the conducting in itself, the music -- stays with me for days afterwards. I can still call up in my imagination his hypnotic, incantational reading of the slow movement of Dvorak's 8th, and the maelstrom of the finale of Saturday's Mahler has been knocking around in my head all week.

It remains to be seen whether or not sheer musical excellence is enough to save the a city's orchestral music in today's circumstances. But, it seems to me, Philadelphia's music lovers should be singing hymns of thanks for Christoph Eschenbach.




Dan Coren received his Ph.D. in music history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971 and is a former member of the Penn music faculty. As an undergraduate he studied conducting at Columbia University and occasionally conducted its student orchestra. He now works as a software developer with Computer Sciences Corporation in Moorestown, N.J. He lives in Queen Village.