Rattle and Hannigan with the Philadelphia Orchestra (1st review)

The Philadelphia Orchestra's season is winding down. It begins a month later than the New York Philharmonic's and ends a month sooner, a reminder of the Orchestra Association's continuing financial woes.

This year has marked the beginning of Yannick Nézet-Séguin's tenure as music director, a generally successful one artistically. Some of Nézet-Séguin's preferences have started to become clear. He seems fond of requiems, one hopes without undue symbolic implications.

Otherwise, however, his programming choices have fallen decidedly on the safe side. There is financial calculation in that, too. There is also a cost.

The point was driven home for this reviewer by Sir Simon Rattle's second concert with the Orchestra, the penultimate one of the season. Rattle put together a varied and idiosyncratic program. He tends to do that, but then it's easier for a visiting conductor to choose the road less traveled than for the helmsman of the Orchestra, for whom the risk of empty seats is not to be taken lightly.

Wagner's shadow

Rattle opened the concert with two ill-fated composers from the Second Viennese School, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Webern, stepping outside for a smoke in occupied Vienna at the end of World War II, was killed by an American soldier for violating a curfew. Berg died of a bee sting. Fate has an odd sense of humor.

Webern began as a post-Romantic composer before adopting Schoenberg's 12-tone system of composition and becoming a musical pointillist whose mature works, employing the sparest of textures, all run under ten minutes in length. Webern did write a symphony, which he believed would be a full-length work requiring a good half hour to perform. It actually clocks in at less than a third that time.

When Webern is performed, it is most often his early, pre-serialist Im Sommerwind, a warm and ingratiating work that makes no heavy demand on the listener. Rattle chose the less frequently played Passacaglia, Op. 1, a ten-minute score that, beginning with the softest of pizzicati, deploys a large orchestra with great virtuosity and assurance. Wagner lurks heavily in the background, and there are accents of Scriabin and Reger. It's the kind of densely weighted and perhaps overwrought work in which tonality appears to be torn apart like taffy.

One can well imagine a young Stravinsky resolving to write music as completely unlike it as possible. The later Webern did as well, although he never quite left Romanticism behind— rather, he miniaturized it.

Still, the Passacaglia is worth the occasional hearing: Stokowski premiered it with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1927, but it wasn't heard again until Mark Wigglesworth (another visiting conductor) performed it in 1999.

Everyman of the Great War

The Passacaglia was followed by the Three Fragments from Berg's opera Wozzeck, one of the essential dramatic works of the 20th Century. The Fragments were not arranged from the opera subsequent to stage performance, but were extracted and performed prior to the premiere in 1925. They focus not on Wozzeck himself, the hero whom Berg conceived as the Everyman of World War I, but on his suffering mistress Marie and her child.

In a way, the Fragments represent a re-imagination of the work as a whole, in which the music is employed to highlight the female protagonist. When heard at a distance of nearly nine decades, it fuses musical Expressionism with the lushness of a post-Romantic orchestra.

If Stravinsky set out to be the anti-Wagner, Berg turns Wagner on his head in another way, using the Wagnerian orchestra not to depict the heroes and gods who represent bourgeois society in distress but that society's proletarian victims.

Hannigan transformed

The coloratura soprano Barbara Hannigan, in blond tresses and a sweeping gown, sang Marie sensitively, though she seemed insufficiently miked at times. The great orchestral crescendo in which the music rises above the action of the drama to a tragic apotheosis was shiveringly good.

After intermission, a transformed Hannigan came out in a jet-black wig and Weimar cabaret costume to match— a black leatherette overcoat, tight black sheath and spiked heels— to perform another operatic excerpt, this time from György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, which depicts an apocalyptic dystopia.

Such a genre had a long pedigree; Wozzeck might be considered an example from a certain angle, and certainly Kurt Weill's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Vikto Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis, a work composed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp by a composer who perished in Auschwitz. Ligeti, who is probably best known for having (involuntarily) supplied music for three Stanley Kubrick films (most notably 2001), was himself a Holocaust survivor as well as a denizen of Stalinist Hungary, which would have offered him copious material.

Podium fight

The Mysteries of the Macabre is a nine-minute romp in which Hannigan offers a bizarre Sprechstimme of nonsense phrases, squawks, pips and vocal leaps that make her absurdist character— a chief of police— sound like Mozart's Queen of the Night on LSD. While singing the notes on perfect pitch, Hannigan discards her coat, pushes Rattle off the podium to mock-conduct a parody of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, and gets booted off in turn by the maestro. The music supporting these goings-on, rendered by a chamber-sized complement heavy on percussion, was witty and surprisingly delicate.

A concert performance of the entire opera in its 1997 revision was offered three years ago by the New York Philharmonic. It would be nice to hear the Philadelphians take a crack at it— or, better yet, to have a full operatic staging— but I keep forgetting that Philadelphia isn't New York; it's Paris.

There was method in Rattle's seeming madness, not only in continuity of theme between Wozzeck and Mysteries of the Macabre, as this excerpt was titled, but in the careers of the three modern composers, for Ligeti had started out as a 12-tone disciple before moving through the experimentalism of the Stockhausen school and finally settling on the atmospheric soundscapes that attracted Kubrick, and on which Ligeti's reputation for the moment chiefly rests.

Idiosyncratic Beethoven

The program concluded with Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, a work from another sonic world entirely. The period instrument revival has meant a leaner, more classical approach to Beethoven in general, but Rattle took the reverse tack, reading the score backwards through the prism of Wagner and Richard Strauss.

The result, with blended tones and a marshaling of Romantic effects, was more like a four-movement tone poem than a work composed while Haydn was still alive. It wasn't everyone's Beethoven, to be sure, but the Kimmel Center audience loved it.

The Pastoral is a score unlike any other Beethoven symphony, with its lyric warmth and proto-Romantic scene painting. Rattle wanted to make us see it as a model for the Forest Murmurs from Siegfried or the Strauss Alpine Symphony, and he made his case, even at some expense to an ideally balanced presentation.

Good news

What, though, is an "ideal" Beethoven? If we can look back to see Beethoven as a bearer and re-shaper of the classical tradition— the period instrument approach— why can't we see him as an influence in turn on even late Romantic composers?

The one thing we'll never be able to do is to hear Beethoven as his first audience did in 1808 at that titanic concert that featured the premieres of both the Fifth and Sixth symphonies, as well as the Choral Fantasy. We must hear with our ears, not theirs, and that means with everything that has come since Beethoven as well as all that went before.

A weak horn entrance in the third movement of the Beethoven aside, the Orchestra gave Rattle everything he wanted by way of a burnished, responsive tone. The good news is that, in its first year since bankruptcy, the Orchestra is still a glorious instrument, the best efforts of its administration to destroy its cohesiveness and morale notwithstanding.

Nézet-Séguin must be given some credit for this recovery, but the chief reason is the pride and professionalism of the musicians themselves. Performing under duress, with reduced wages and benefits, they have still maintained the Orchestra as one of the world's premier cultural institutions. Would that the city itself were worthy of its treasure.♦


To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.