Ticciati conducts Beethoven and Sibelius (2nd review)

It's always a bonus to have visiting conductors from Europe come to town, because the norm across the pond is to program 90-minute concerts instead of the 70-minute programs that American maestros laze through. For that reason alone the Philadelphia Orchestra debut of British-born Robin Ticciati was welcome.

Ticciati, who at age 28 is principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and music director-designate of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, bears a striking physical resemblance to his mentor, Sir Simon Rattle, with his lanky physique, dense halo of hair, and sculpted baton technique. Some hints of Sir Simon's independent style of music making could also be detected in a concert that included Beethoven's Violin Concerto and the Sibelius Second Symphony.

If Beethoven had lived no longer than Mozart, the Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61, would have been his last work. Today it's universally acknowledged as the king of fiddle concertos, but this work was relatively neglected until the great violinist Joseph Joachim took it up in the mid-19th Century.

Joachim's friend Brahms, who wrote his own Violin Concerto for him, took the Beethoven for his model, as did Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Sibelius, Elgar, Bartok, Bloch and Shostakovich. Like Beethoven's, all these concertos eschewed virtuosity for the sake of serious symphonic statement; all, too, would run in the neighborhood of 40 minutes in length, the benchmark Beethoven had established for "major" works.

Cloying effect

The soloist here was the German-Japanese violinist Arabella Steinbacher, also making her Orchestra debut. Steinbacher delivers a pure, sweet tone, but not one she varies often, and the similarity of her lyric lines, repeatedly teased upward to held notes, created an effect that ultimately struck me as cloying.

Ticciati indulged Steinbacher's tempi and restrained the Orchestra to fit her sound, creating a concertante-like accompaniment. This gesture was gentlemanly, to be sure, but Beethoven is no gentleman, and he seemed to be growling around the edges of the performance, waiting to shake his mane.

Familiar but strange

Ticciati showed his own mettle in the Sibelius. This Second Symphony may be the work most associated with the Orchestra, and it's one the Orchestra can no doubt play in its sleep. It can be easy, too, for audiences to doze through it until the great peroration of the Finale breaks through like a sun dispersing the Finnish mists.

But this is also a very strange work, whose melodic material drifts through a brooding orchestral texture like fragments reluctant to cohere. The overarching presence, as in most early 20th-Century music, is that of Wagner, but a deconstructed Wagner whose leitmotifs are not clearly sounded but teased out in bits and pieces.

The result is episodic and yet feels somehow unified by a latent impulse that can only disclose itself across the entire symphonic span. Woodwinds carry snatches of melody; brasses overlay these snatches with counter-figurations; the strings busy themselves with ostinato patterns; and all of it lurches this way and that, like Bruckner on laxatives.

Reinventing the symphony

What Sibelius is doing here is reinventing symphonic narrative through the prism of a late Romanticism that's feeling its way into modernity. Today we hear Sibelius as a Romantic who never quite entered the 20th Century and who, at an impasse between the triumphant models of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, fell silent for the last 30 years of his life.

But to many contemporaries he was the heir apparent to Beethoven, the man who had finally liberated the symphony from Classicism and whose riddling forms represented the first genuine departure from the Viennese tradition in a century. To read a perceptive musicologist of the Sibelius period such as Cecil Gray is to see how new, challenging, and "difficult" this unexpected figure from the north appeared.

Today, in retrospect, the high road to modernism seems to lie through Mahler, whose work fell into disfavor in the 1920s and 1930s just as Sibelius reached the peak of his success. The two men met in 1907 and famously disagreed on what a symphony should try to accomplish, although with mutual respect.

It isn't a matter of either/or, though. Musical history has room for both of them— and for Bruckner too, who with Mahler and Sibelius forms a triad in the history of the symphony.

Fresh ideas

Their most eminent successor, Shostakovich, pursued a more Mahlerian path, with backward glances at Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. But Sibelius influences his work as well, particularly in his use of woodwinds, his fondness for motivic cells, and his obsessive rhythmic patterns. Music is a conversation among giants.

Ticciati's probing account of the Sibelius Second emphasized the music's rough-hewn, experimental quality. This young conductor has his own ideas about the music, and they may well evolve with time, but their freshness was appealing. The Orchestra was clearly responsive to Ticciati, too, and the horns were in as good a form as I've heard them in a long time.

Beethoven and Sibelius will pack a house, and the capacity audience responded warmly. Ticciati's debut was something to enjoy; it may also be something to remember.

The latest news from bankruptcy court, by the way, is that the Orchestra Association's filing has already cost it $5.5 million. This is exactly the deficit that "forced" the Association into bankruptcy to begin with.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.