The Philadelphia Orchestra plays John Williams

This season, that last rule has been bent if not broken too often, as it was in this week’s orchestra program, which opened with music from John Williams’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Movie music can be of concert quality. One thinks, obviously, of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, which was turned into a superb cantata, or of his Ivan the Terrible, which the Orchestra has also done. Then there is Shostakovich’s score for The Gadfly, performed in January’s concerts, and the scores of composers, such as Copland, Bernstein, and Walton. Even Camille Saint-Saëns wrote for the cinema.

But John Williams — “the great John Williams,” as Maestro Stéphane Denève introduced him in pre-concert remarks — is not of this company. He is an able and highly successful film composer, to be sure, and no harm is done in including him in a pops concert. But he didn’t belong on a regular series program, and the thinness of his material even in a 13-minute segment was painfully evident. The Orchestra’s time and talent were wasted.

I emphasize the point because the orchestra’s local music-making has fallen by about a quarter in recent years with the conversion of the Mann summer concerts into an almost entirely pop affair from which the orchestra is largely excluded. The Mann was once a venue in which the Orchestra could perform crowd-pleasers that would not then take up excessive space on regular programs. That outlet gone, they now dilute the season, unadventurous as it has become of late.

You would be correct to conclude that I did not attend this week’s concert to hear Williams, but rather endured the distraction for the sake of the other two works on the program, Magnus Lindberg’s Graffiti for chorus and orchestra, and a suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Lindberg is a contemporary composer of repute, and Prokofiev’s score is the greatest full-length ballet of the 20th century.

From Pompeii to Philadelphia

The Finnish-born Lindberg has become familiar through residencies. His music makes a lot of sound, with a Hindemith-like density and a propensity for darker tones, heavy on the brass and percussion. That was in evidence in Graffiti, which features at one point a sonorous trombone blast that is allowed to slowly decay against orchestral murmuration to striking effect. In a way — perhaps intentional? — this moment mimics the score’s subject matter. Graffiti sets a text woven, postmodern style, from scratchings found on the walls of Pompeii, which disappeared with a blast from Nature’s own brass section on an August day in 79 C.E., when the city was buried by the volcano on whose slopes it sat. Until Hiroshima, no city disappeared from the ranks of the living so quickly and completely; unlike it, Pompeii was not destroyed but preserved down to its very pots and pans, and its graffiti as well.

Graffiti has become a kind of cultural obsession in our own time, both as a symbol of urban vitality and self-destructiveness. For the Romans of Pompeii, citizen and slave alike, it would be a collective epitaph. Lindberg’s text begins with a stolen property announcement (“A bronze pot’s missing from the shop . . .” [translation slightly revised by yours truly]), and goes on to depict a nascent (or perhaps perennial) capitalism (“Profit is happiness!”), and what passed for fun and games in imperial Rome (“There will be crucifixions, a wild animal hunt, and a sunroof”). There is a passage of gibberish, personal advertisements (the program solemnly admonishes us to expect “adult language”), and even bits of Stoic philosophy (“By despising the smallest wrong, it becomes the greatest”). A bit of Virgil is thrown in for good measure, and, at the end, a warning that one has entered the labyrinth where the minotaur dwells. But all of us familiar with city life know that already.

The music, for all its romps, is more tonally accessible than much of Lindberg’s other work, and there are particularly beautiful moments in the bassoons and the oboe. The performance seemed to please Lindberg, who was in attendance, and the Orchestra clearly enjoyed its work. I would certainly welcome future hearings.

A sonic match for the Bard

Sergei Prokofiev, who shares a birthday with Shakespeare, is of course associated with him through his Romeo and Juliet, which, with Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet symphony, remains one of the three greatest musical settings of the Bard outside the operatic stage. For my money, it is the only score ever composed that provides a sonic match for the kaleidoscopic richness and vitality of the Shakespearean imagination, and its pathos as well.

Denève made his own selection from the three orchestral suites Prokofiev derived from the ballet, but there was little sense of dramatic progression in the performance. At first, Denève seemed to be trying to inject a little of Petrouchka’s tartness into Prokofiev’s lush melody and lavish dissonance, and later sections had a bit of choppiness. The orchestra strings saved the day at the end in the lovers’ eulogy.

It was a mixed evening, but not a bland one, which took the audience from outer space to Roman antiquity and Renaissance Verona: talk about time travel. And, oh yes, we’re promised more John Williams for next year.