Rattle and Lang Lang with the Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle, once assiduously courted by the Philadelphia Orchestra, usually packs the house when he returns. When Lang Lang accompanies him, a sellout is assured. I've had issues with both artists in the past, but mostly they were spot-on in their collaboration on Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto.

The last time I'd heard Lang, in 2009, he turned in a travesty performance of the Chopin Second Concerto that was all about calling attention to his prodigious technique at the expense of any coherent and minimally respectful projection of the music. (For my review of that concert, click here.)

This Beethoven Third included sudden shifts in tempo and dynamics, some more persuasive than others, but also welcome signs of a maturing artist who puts the music first.

Dobrin's complaint

Virtuosity aside, Lang brings two formidable assets: a powerful and commanding tone that gives the Romantic piano its full due and cuts through almost any orchestral texture, and a remarkable clarity of voicing that came through despite a generous application of pedal. The right-hand trills he brought off were remarkable on both counts, but Lang showed delicacy and restraint in the concerto's Largo movement as well.

It may take Lang a while to fully work out the kinks and acknowledge that the music is the boss. Only when you've learned that lesson do you earn the right to put your own individual stamp on it.

But when a pianist's technique puts one in mind of a Horowitz, one is dealing with a major talent. The Inquirer's Peter Dobrin called attention to Lang's continuing habit of facing the audience. When I saw that in Lang's previous Chopin performance, I took it for mugging, not to say smirking. This time around, I thought it might have reflected concentration, although Dobrin remains annoyed by it. In either case it's distracting, and won't be missed if Lang can dispense with it.

Rattle's accompaniment was flexible enough to frame the Concerto while accommodating the occasional pianistic eccentricity, and the two men joined for an encore— Dvorak's Slavonic Dance, Op. 46, #1— that was delightful in its ebullience, and showed Rattle no slouch at the keyboard himself.

Lang's exuberance was also infectious. All will be well when he takes more joy in the music than in himself. That was the case here.

Puzzling title

The program opened with a ten-minute work by Andrew Norman with the awkward title of Unstuck. Norman, a Brooklyn native who was present for the performance, explained the provenance in program notes by reference to a line in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five that had helped him over a compositional block, but that made it no less odd—maybe a misspelling of the German Urstuck, as my inner editor suggested to me?

As for the music, it showed a brilliant grasp of orchestral writing that gave the Orchestra a chance for some virtuosity of its own, and Rattle performed it with precision and élan. The substance of the work was another matter. Since it was alternately very loud and very soft with no gradation in between, it didn't project much more than a bundle of effects (rather like Lang Lang's 2009 Chopin).

Norman said that the insight Vonnegut gave him was that a work didn't have to cohere. Dubious advice, I'd have to say. Maybe Norman should try reading another novelist.

Frankenstein monster

The second half of Rattle's program consisted of what the program indicated as back-to-back performances of the Sibelius Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, which turned out to be joined at the hip since Rattle, startlingly, launched into the one-movement Seventh without pause, as if it were the Sixth's final movement. The program, while not announcing this novel idea, seemed to make some argument for it, noting that Sibelius himself had observed that both symphonies were conceived simultaneously while he was still working on his revisions to the Fifth Symphony.

The trouble is that the two works, while perhaps fraternal twins, are very different symphonies. The Sixth has always been the ice maiden among the Sibelius set, more a suite-like set of tone poems than a work that exhibits dramatic urgency. The music is lovely, but probes mood rather than depth.

The Seventh, on the other hand, is the most focused of all the Sibelius compositions. By casting it in a single movement— a radical innovation, later adopted by the Roy Harris Third and Seventh Symphonies, and by Miaskovsky in his 21st— it emphasized tightness of conception and construction. It belongs, obviously, on its own, and whatever pedagogic purpose may be served by juxtaposing it with another work, it's not an appendage to anything.

Beethoven tried it

Efforts like this have been made before, for example in trying to "complete" Bruckner's Ninth Symphony with an add-on choral movement from another composition.

Then there's the example of Beethoven's Op. 130 Quartet, which originally had the Grosse Fuge as its final movement before his publisher talked him into composing an alternate movement more in keeping with the rest of the work. Nowadays the Op. 130 is most often performed in this latter version, although occasionally an ensemble will revert to the original. In this case, however, it's the composer himself who gives warrant. None exists for splicing two Sibelius symphonies together.

As a listener, I could only roll with the punches. In the event, both symphonies were very well performed, with Rattle bringing out the Wagnerian horn sonorities in the Sixth with special emphasis and giving a warm, burnished sound to the Seventh. The Orchestra was glorious. What Sir Simon couldn't do, though, was make his musical Frankenstein work as a whole.

It's a shame that Sibelius never was able to write an Eighth Symphony. But that's hardly a reason to reduce his output to six.