Maddeningly Consistent

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The New York Sun

One of the truly great musicians of the last century, Frederick Fennell, died this week at the age of 90. Founder of the Eastman Wind Ensemble, he quite literally revolutionized the art and method of band performance. No wind or horn player born after 1950 would be playing in quite the same manner today without the influence of this modern march king.


Thoughts of Fennell’s spare and sinewy style were paramount in my mind as conductor JoAnn Falletta opened Thursday’s concert by the Juilliard Symphony with a precise and athletic version of William Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture. Here the wind section was crisp and clean, providing just the right sense of lean propulsion. Ms. Falletta had them stand as a unit at the music’s conclusion to receive some well-deserved appreciation.


Now all of 21, Canadian Vicky Chow has been a piano soloist with symphony orchestras for more than half her life. Her approach to the Bartok Piano Concerto No. 1 seemed a bit gentle at the outset, rather more like a performance of the lovely final of the composer’s three concerti than of this brutal first. But she found her percussive side about midway through the opening movement, impressively navigating Bartok’s reef-strewn waters while emphasizing his ever-surprising sense of where to locate the accents. Ms. Falletta held everything in polyrhythmic check quite nicely.


In terms of clarity and precision, this was a far superior performance to the one that I heard not long ago in Los Angeles, where Esa-Pekka Salonen lost control of his instrumental forces, leaving soloist Mitsuko Uchida to swim for herself. But here in New York, there was little fire from the assembled throng and no larger sweep of line emanating from the podium. The essentially conductorless interchange between piano and percussion in the Andante – what a friend calls “the folk music of another planet” – was located much closer to the emotional center of this iconoclastic piece than any of the sections where the ensemble as a whole played a major role.


I have my own idee fixe about the “Symphonie fantastique”: It is impossible to perform it satisfactorily from beginning to end during the same interpretation. There is no recording (and I have heard them all) that consistently captures its amazingly variegated descriptive moods. Either the first and third movements are sensitively played but the ball scene is slow-footed, or the early movements are clumsy and poorly paced and the fourth and fifth are tremendously exciting, or – as in the old Boulez London Symphony version – the waltz is dizzying and intimidating, a furious and intoxicating whirlpool, but the remainder of the reading is monochromatic.


I am convinced this phenomenon is caused by the unparalleled kinetic energy of this innovative piece, ostensibly reflecting its persona’s use of opium. Such an explosion of sensation defies the predominance of an individual conductor’s personality, and I am still waiting patiently for a performance that captures all of the colors of this complex orchestral palette.


Many of those colors were indeed in evidence this night, and the ensemble made much of them. After all, these are some of the best young instrumentalists on the planet, and Ms. Falletta wanted to show them off. However, the Berlioz fantasy is not Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. Several of the individual solo and combined sectional effects seemed exaggerated and some, like positioning a double-reed player in the audience for the shepherds’s ranz des vaches from the “Scene in the Country,” were downright precious. Much of said solo work was superb, however, especially the clarinet in the “Witches’ Sabbath” and the bassoon in the “March [or, in this particular case, the Gallop] to the Scaffold.”


This rendition was done in by a ball scene that had a maddeningly consistent quality to it – rather than recreating the hornet’s nest of elastic phrases that the composer intended. There was little or no variety to the utterances and certainly no contrast between the beloved’s theme and its environs. This was hardly the right moment to showcase the orchestra’s ability to play metronomically. Also, the bottom was curiously missing in the final two movements: Perhaps this was just one of those years when no competent ophicleide players applied to the school.


When Alice Tully commissioned Olivier Messiaen to compose “From the Canyons to the Stars” for her new hall, she told him that the space could accommodate no more than 44 players. On Thursday there were twice that many crammed onto the stage, and they were often encouraged to play at a very high volume. The resultant reverberation was unfortunate and decidedly unmusical. Since the various Juilliard ensembles perform at many different venues, shouldn’t this particular event have been scheduled at Avery Fisher or Carnegie?


The New York Sun

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