Orchestra plays Bernstein and Brahms

The Philadelphia Orchestra is alive, though just how well it will be over the long haul remains to be seen. Several other ranking orchestras, although none of Philadelphia's caliber, have been through wrenching salary and benefit contractions lately, even if none of them has gone through the international humiliation of a bankruptcy court.

All in all, that highly avoidable event, and the completely avoidable debacle of the relocation of the Barnes collection, make 2012 probably the worst year culturally for the City of Brotherly Love since the redcoats occupied it in 1777.

The press reported how nice the Orchestra administration was being to the musicians before the season-opening performance of the Verdi Requiem. I can imagine the players gritting their teeth as Allison Vulgamore gushed about what a cultural treasure they are. No doubt they were gratified by the patrons' warm response, although the shrinking audience base in their home city is obviously a factor in the brutal wage cuts they've (so far) endured.

Pining for Boston

Maybe, to judge by the eight-minute ovation they received Tuesday at Carnegie Hall with their Verdi Requiem concert, the Orchestra's musicians are simply better appreciated elsewhere. Maybe Carnegie Hall's superior acoustics have something to do with that too, even though they aren't what they used to be before the semi-disastrous renovation the grand lady suffered some years ago.

Philadelphia spent $300 million on a new concert hall that only marginally improved sound quality while diminishing intimacy. I'd love to hear the Orchestra some day at Boston's Symphony Hall, where music sounds like no place else in America... but dream on.

A great deal has been laid on the shoulders of the Orchestra's new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, relentlessly promoted as "Yannick," presumably because his given name rolls off the tongue more easily. One has to wish him well, though Yannick will be best served by honest criticism.

Suitable curtain raiser

I noticed the hall being quietly papered before the concert I attended, the Orchestra's second of the season. The program included a commissioned premiere of the Concertino CusqueÓ±o by the California-born composer Gabriela Lena Frank, Leonard Bernstein's Serenade for Violin, Strings, Harp, and Percussion, and the Brahms Fourth Symphony.

Frank has been preceded by much publicity concerning the physical disabilities she has valiantly overcome and still faces. Her Concertino is an eclectic, seven-and-a-half-minute work that will make a suitable curtain raiser for a while, with its Latin-style cross-rhythms (I caught a whiff of Villa-Lobos in the score, although it also quotes from Benjamin Britten) and piquant orchestration.

Lenny's salad years

Bernstein's Serenade, composed in 1954, is a relative novelty here, not having had its Philadelphia premiere until 1973 under Eugene Ormandy, with a repeat performance in 2000 under Wolfgang Sawallisch. Its appearance put me in mind of the Lenny of the 1950s, who— with his simultaneous command of classical and Broadway idiom, his equal facility as a pianist and conductor, and his easy mastery of the new medium of television (the then-pioneering series "Omnibus")— was the most dazzling and multifaceted of upscale entertainers.

He seemed a force of nature then, taking New York as Sherman took Atlanta, and capping his conquest by becoming conductor of the New York Philharmonic while creating West Side Story, the finest musical of that decade. Even his one commercial failure of those years, the hybrid opera-cum-musical Candide, is now an acknowledged classic of the 20th-Century American musical stage.

Yannick won't be in the same league. But then, neither is anybody else.

What would Plato think?

Lenny's one regret was that he couldn't be the (gloriously) long-winded Gustav Mahler, whom he rescued from oblivion, at least in America; Bernstein settled instead for being a long-winded conductor whose distended phrasing could sometimes make Klemperer sound like a speed freak. In the '50s, though, before he got Serious, Bernstein's nervous high spirits were as infectious as his hunger for adulation (public and private) was ravenous.

It was therefore no accident that his most ambitious classical work of the decade, as his most successful popular one, was about love. The Serenade was inspired by a reading of Plato's Symposium, and there is a quasi-official program attached to its five movements.

What Plato— who held the arts suspect although he was, of course, a consummate artist himself— might have thought of Bernstein's jazz-inflected Serenade is anybody's guess, but the score needs no literary accompaniment to be enjoyed for what it is: one of the finest American works for violin and orchestra in the repertory.

Bach by way of Stravinsky

It begins with an unaccompanied four-minute solo whose austere melody, carried in the upper register, recalls Bach by way of Stravinsky. The orchestra enters softly, almost shyly, but soon mixes it up with great energy, and we are off to the races.

Much of the Serenade has an improvisational feel, although it's a through-composed work with sustaining melodic elements appearing in fresh guises throughout. The haunting fourth-movement Adagio is one of Bernstein's finest lyric creations.

Joshua Bell played the solo part with a feathery touch, and he and Nézet-Séguin engaged in a turning and tucking duet of their own onstage, their rapport with the music and each other evident.

Brahms flogged

The Brahms Fourth Symphony, now a reliable warhorse of the repertory, was long considered a strange and problematic work; the English musicologist Cecil Gray, writing in the 1920s, was still at pains to explicate it even in the age of The Rite of Spring and Pierrot Lunaire. Of course, all great work is strange, and remains so no matter what patina of familiarity it may acquire.

It is strange, and passing wondrous, that Brahms is able to develop so powerful an argument out of the sing-song four-note pattern tossed back and forth in the opening Allegro non troppo, or to construct the complex, introspective sonic world of the Finale on the Baroque form of the passacaglia. Brahms is music for grown-ups, and takes a certain life experience to fully grasp. It continues to grow for me, and doesn't cease to challenge.

Nézet-Séguin got a full and robust sound from the Orchestra, and gave the slower and more reflective passages the breath they needed. He tended to take faster ones at breakneck speed, however, and although the Orchestra responded with nimbleness and agility, there was a certain sacrifice in the content delivered.

Back to Muti

It's refreshing in a way to hear Brahms flogged on, and he can certainly take it; but the Brahms Fourth is not the Beethoven Seventh.

This vigor seems to be Nézet-Séguin's style, and I suppose we'll have to get accustomed to it, as we did with Eschenbach's taste for the lingering detail. There's no single valid way to make music, and no single encompassing style that will accommodate everything.

After the Sawallisch and Dutoit years, Nézet-Séguin seems to be harking back to the early years of Riccardo Muti's tenure in the 1980s (the choice of the Verdi Requiem for Yannick's opening concert was perhaps a salute). But we are very early in the game, and have heard him in only a limited repertory as yet.♦


To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.
To read another review of the Brahms Fourth Symphony by Dan Coren, click here.
To read a response, click here.