Philadelphia Orchestra’s season begins (first review)

Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin followed this prologue by introducing an Ormandyesque lollipop, the Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah. This entry was part of the 40/40 promotion sponsored by the Orchestra this year, in which subscribers got to choose a piece that hadn’t appeared in its concerts for at least 40 years from a selection of lollipops, most of them well past their expiration date. This gimmick was inferentially tied in with the fact that Nézet-Séguin himself will turn 40 in March, a point he noted from the podium.

Yannick certainly hasn’t suffered from a lack of marketing since his arrival. May I suggest that enough is enough?

Lang Lang’s Liberace act

Things had to get worse before they got better. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 (K. 453) is one of those sublime works in which a genius outdoes himself and redefines a genre. Mozart had done the same thing before, with the “Jeunehomme” Concerto (K. 271). But with K. 453, we enter the concertos of his final period, which for sheer beauty and perfection of form remain unsurpassed.

The problem with the performance of K. 453 was not in the orchestra, whose accompaniment was limpid and deft. While the musicians played Mozart, however, soloist Lang Lang was playing Lang Lang.

Lang is an immensely gifted technician, but, despite the strides he seemed to have made when I heard him last, he hasn’t yet become a pianist. His deconstruction of K. 453 — or shall we simply call it destruction? — was decidedly a step backward.

Things started well enough, but tempos and dynamics soon became arbitrary, as if the music were simply an occasion for personal showmanship. To this annoyance was added Lang’s patented Liberace act: drooped or wagging arms, air-conducting, and dishy smiles directed at the audience. Lang is now in his 30s, and although audiences apparently dote on him and other musicians tolerate him (or silently grit their teeth), he must soon decide whether to put his great gifts to artistic use or merely squander them.

Lang played the Rondo alla Turca from Mozart’s Sonata K. 331 for an encore, and made that happy piece sound like Honegger.

Bad timing

Richard Strauss’s massive Alpine Symphony, which occupied the program’s second half, is more accurately characterized as a tone poem in 22 continuous sections, each with a descriptive title. The piece as a whole narrates a mountain ascent and return, complete with a furious storm that obviously glances back at Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Strauss and some companions had made such an ascent when he was a boy, but in conceiving the episode dramatically he imported much philosophical and autobiographical baggage, and when he began work on it in 1899 he was still confessedly under the influence of Nietzsche and Wagner.

The score was originally to be called The Antichrist: An Alpine Symphony, with obvious reference to Nietzsche. It was well enough that he dropped the prefix, although it showed Strauss determined to épater la bourgeoisie, as he was soon to do in his shock operas, Salome and Elektra. Strauss didn’t progress beyond sketches at that point, though, only taking the project up again in 1911.

By the time he completed it in 1915, Europe was at war, and a work depicting (as it finally did) a hero confronting the Romantic Sublime, even with some typical doses of Straussian irony, might seem an oddly self-absorbed exercise in the midst of a civilizational crisis. It wasn’t taken so at the time, though, and the Philadelphia Orchestra and a pit group in Cincinnati waged an almost comical battle to stage the first American performance the following year.

It might also be observed that, in contrast to literary and artistic responses to World War I, no musical work genuinely reflected the trauma of the Great War until Alban Berg completed his Wozzeck in 1923. Still, the image of an artist with his head in mountain scenery while millions faced death in the trenches feels a bit uncomfortable even now.

Yannick’s challenge

We are in any case left with the music. The opening section of An Alpine Symphony comes straight out of Wagner, although this time perhaps as a deliberate allusion. Similarly, the bells that ring later on clearly evoke Mahler. Mahlerian, too, are the dense and complex textures of the work.

Strauss had begun — in Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme — to simplify his orchestral line, and he would ultimately claim Mozart as his master. But An Alpine Symphony is in many ways a throwback to the Expressionist hurly-burly of Salome and Elektra, even as it recalls and extends the earlier, quasi-autobiographical tone poems. It’s almost a great work, in which the grand and the grandiose are inextricably mixed together. It will always be an anomaly of sorts, but it’s also impossible to ignore — a solitary Alp itself in the Straussian corpus.

Nézet-Séguin, who programmed an ambitious concert version of Salome at the end of last season, clearly relishes the challenge of Strauss’s big works. So do the Orchestra’s musicians, to judge not only from their present conductor but also from their many performances of Strauss under Wolfgang Sawallisch (1993-2003). Nézet-Séguin whipped up great tides of sound but brought out a wealth of turbulent inner detail too. If his Strauss lacked the Sehnsucht and burnish of a Rudolf Kempe, it’s probably as close as anyone not to the German-Viennese manner born can come.

To read another review by Victor Schermer, click here.