Chamber Aspirants Meet the Masters

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The New York Sun

Beethoven was the featured composer as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center inaugurated its new season of concerts at the Rose Studio on Thursday evening. As is its wont, the organization teams veterans with neophytes. As is my wont, I would rather discuss the performances of the aspirants rather than the masters.

It is apparently unnecessary for any new oboists to migrate to New York, as Stephen Taylor is already principal of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the American Composers Orchestra, Speculum Musicae, Orpheus, and the New York Woodwind Quintet. Along with hornist Stewart Rose, who produced some of the most elegant playing I have recently experienced, he guided three younger charges through three challenging pieces.

Beethoven was 25 when he penned the Quintet for Piano and Winds, Op. 16, and thus just about the same age as these three young men. Pianist Inon Barnatan suffered an up-and-down performance, quite impressive in his sense of light touch and delicate phrasing, but hesitant in two of the three iterations of his major solo rhythmic passage in the Allegro ma non troppo. The first time he simply stopped at one point and the second he lost his way for a bit. The third, however, was smooth and steady. Clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester was excellent throughout, combining a breathy and woody tone with a savvy sense of characterization. Refreshingly, especially for his age group, he did not play the beautiful Andante cantabile in the same style as the merry Rondo. He may have matriculated at Curtis, but he was raised in Spain by a family of clarinetists and zarzuela singers, and it shows.

For me, the greatest work ever written for winds is Francis Poulenc’s Sextuor. Unfortunately, this was not on the program, but the same composer’s Trio for Piano, Oboe and Bassoon, which contains several quotes from, and many stylistic references to, the greater piece, was indeed on display. Here Mr. Barnatan was much more focused, impressively dexterous as Poulenc makes him shift from foursquare rhythms to syncopated ones (and back) in the most mercurial of manners. Bassoonist Peter Kolkay provided solid rhythmic grounding and was extremely moving in his introductory solo to the middle Andante.

Wind players tell me that Jean Francaix wrote some of the most difficult pieces in the repertoire, and I certainly could hear the complexities of the Divertissement for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon. The harmonic language is dense and thorny but exposes a fragile beauty in the right hands. The grizzled Mr. Taylor took the lead here, producing some stunningly lyrical passages. Mr. Kolkay had what appeared to be the most unforgiving part, the rhythms shifting from measure to measure at a brisk tempo. One moment we were in a frenetic silent cinema, the next on the boulevard, the next sliding down a slippery slope of off-the-beat accents.This confident bassoonist handled it all with aplomb and even a bit of Gallic flair. Again Mr. Franch-Ballester provided just the right touch of European panache.

***

At the end of an interesting week, Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony concluded their survey of the complete symphonies of Beethoven on Friday evening at Avery Fisher Hall. This was not your father’s Beethoven, but it might have been your greatgreat-grandfather’s. With a nod toward the composer’s original tempo markings, these performances have ranged from slightly accelerated to pushed beyond their limits. As in every overview of the nine, some evenings were simply better than others.

All began well with a speedy version of the Symphony No. 1. Mr. Haitink has used several configurations in this series and here we had the larger small ensemble. Attacks were notably crisp, string sound limpid and muscular, wind playing intensely distinct. Maestro was careful to maintain the Classical balance of the piece even as he ratcheted up the tempo.

Conventional wisdom states that the acoustics are better at Carnegie than at Avery Fisher. Not so.They are different.Where Carnegie warms the sound, it also masks some of its definition. At Fisher, every note is heard just as it is played. For many ensembles, this is not a good thing. But for a group as disciplined as the London Symphony, these are close to ideal conditions.

The Andante cantabile con moto was refreshingly buoyant and brisk in this reading, bobbing along like the red, red robin.The Menuetto, however, was so quick that it was just a blur, the lingering smoke trail of the cartoon roadrunner.At this pace, the substance of the music seemed a bit underweight.

In fact, the Londoners played so fast that they had time for an overture. When Otto Nicolai inserted the Leonore Overture No. 3 into the scene change midway through Act II of “Fidelio,” he not only improved the opera exponentially (Mr. Levine, are you listening?), but he also freed this symphonic poem from curtain raiser status. It was actually quite satisfying to hear the piece treated as a stand-alone orchestral work.

This was a full orchestra performance of remarkable clarity, but there was a problem. For all of their technical excellence, these people simply cannot do febrile. There is a decided reserve about the LSO, and it is in fact something of a trademark. Even though the instrumental balances were perfect, the staccatos crystalline, the offstage trumpet eloquent, this reading missed the mark. In the great peripeteia before the triumphant finale, we did not hear the reversal of fortune of both Florestan and Don Pizarro, but rather an assemblage of competent string players simply going up and down the scale.

No movement in all of Beethoven is more affecting than the slow movement of the 7th Symphony. Twentiethcentury conductors from Mahler to von Karajan have expressed the deepest anguish by layering a very slow tempo with wave upon wave of ever more searing string passages describing man’s inhumanity to man. A favorite among filmmakers to accompany images of starving children or bombed cities, this intensely emotional music never fails to touch an audience to its very core.

Well, hardly ever. Mr. Haitink began his 7th with a conventional tempo for the Vivace.This was the best performance of the evening, featuring some exquisite horn playing — yes, they even hit those impossibly cruel concluding high notes expertly. After this successful beachhead, the conductor had much leeway in tempo choice for the Allegretto. Unfortunately, he opted for the throwaway sprint, leaving the poetics and the humanity of the movement in the dust.

The unkindest cut of all, however, was saved for the Finale. This series, which, up until this moment, had been so notably forthright, ended with a bit of cheating. It was a physical impossibility for the strings to enunciate each individual note distinctly at this breakneck speed. They chose instead to slur and slide their way through much of the exposition, putting the lie to the argument that this is what Beethoven intended with his ambitious metronome markings. If he had wanted glissandi, he would have written them. All seemed to be engineered rather callously to produce the maximum response from an audience who could be seduced into thinking that fast equaled good. The stratagem worked marvelously, as the crowd roared on cue. But this Allegro con brio was ultimately less “the apotheosis of the dance” (Wagner’s phrase) and more its apoplexy.


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