Carnegie Hall in Review
Borodin String Quartet: Oct. 21
Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra: Oct. 22
A trio of concerts last week at Carnegie Hall explored the gamut of classical music from Beethoven to Boulez. Over three nights, we heard a piano recital from the brilliant Pierre Laurent Aimard, lieder from the lovely mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Mahlerian fireworks from the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and elegiac chamber works from the Borodin String Quartet. Together, these concerts illustrate the potential successes and pitfalls of varied programming.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who played a widely-varied program during a recital on Thursday night seems the perfect counterpoint to another well-respected French pianist, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who played Carnegie last week with the BSO. Thibaudet, a virtuosic is somewhat uneven pianist, loves flamboyance, both in performance and dress. He has a slick, Eurotrash look that gels well with his natural good looks and dynamic piano playing. Laurent, no less dynamic, assumes the stage in an understated black button-up frock. At the bench, he tears away at the piano as if possessed. But his dynamism of all a different order than Thibaudet’s; while Thibaudet has a way of making everything seem easy, Laurent constantly reminds us of how hard he’s working.
Before the first work on Thursday’s program, he sat still at the bench for nearly a minute as tardy audience-members assumed their seats (actually glaring at an old lady as she made her way to her seat). He gracefully dove into the Danseuses de Delphes, the first of four excerpts from the first book of Debussy’s preludes. He played it with soft sustain and unexpected phrasings. His bass notes were especially gentle and he loved to linger at the end of phrases. He gave a light and quick account of Le Vent dans la plaine, making it sound more like a refreshing spring shower, than wind. He achieved this through delicate peddling and waiting to release his notes. A bar or two into Les Sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir, he interrupted his playing to admonish the audience to desist from coughing. His irritation seemed to infect his playing, and that two final excerpts from the Debussy were hardly as controlled as their predecessors. He tried to compensate for this by making gesturing widely with his right arm, but on the whole Les Sons and La Danse de Puck suffered from hasty transitions and articulations that seemed more angry than playful.
Aimard returned to the instrument for Pierre Boulez’s challenging Piano Sonata No. 1. Boulez, who turns 80 this year, produced the two-movement sonata when he was 21. Despite its comparatively limited appeal, the strikingly mathematical 12-tone work exhibits such an incredible dynamic range and spans the entire keyboard, that is makes for violent and fascinating music making. Aimard was more than up to the task and his dramatic interpretation was full of sharp and jagged element, plucking high notes in crisp staccato. The performance was the musical equivalent of a lighting bolt.
Aimard followed that, with a slightly more accessibly work and one that clearly highlighted his strengths as a pianist, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Beginning with the fluttering notes of the first movement, every element of his playing was calculated and precise. He raised himself off the bench, bending in to the keyboard to show his total involvement with the music. He tore into some notes and glided on others, but he never succumbed to sentimentality. Even at his most expressive, his clean and finely detailed technique shone through.
The concert’s second half was devoted to Schumann’s Carnavale, a brilliantly-colored work in 22 segments that the composer termed an ‘autobiography in music.” Running about ½ an hour, it lies somewhere between Chopin’s Preludes, with its introspective quality of relishing in pianistic delights and variety and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which explores the orchestral and even theatrical possibilities of the instrument. As the sole Romantic offering on the program, it allowed Aimard the opportunity to show off different techniques and styles and sound alternately lithe, dour, impassioned and playful in the short works that comprise the piece. Together with the pieces from the first half of the program, Tuesday night’s performance revealed Aimard as a supremely talented musician equally at home with Romanticism as with Serialism.
The following evening brought the Borodin String Quartet to Zankel Hall in a program of Beethoven and Shostakovich, for the first of two concerts at Carnegie Hall. The Borodin is entering its 60th year, making it the world’s oldest String Quartet and features one of its original members, the 80-year-old Valentin Berlinsky, as the cellist. Friday night’s concert paired Beethoven’s 11th String Quartet with Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 15. Sandwiched somewhat awkwardly between the two was Beethoven’s Große Fuge, a later work originally intended as the finale to that composer’s final Quartet No. 13.
The book-ending pieces on the program both express the personal sorrow of their creators; but the appropriateness of the pairing was somewhat offset by an uneven performance. Subtitled “Serioso,” Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor is a somber, somewhat stark piece whose emotional content, expressed in dissonant harmonies, dramatic use of silence, and melodies that spew forth with unexpected passion and anxiety, is connected to the composer’s gradual descent into total deafness. The first movement was given a very angular and spry reading, with the first violinist, Ruben Aharonian, sounding especially stately and in command. Berlinsky’s bowing sounded less-than-full and was often out-of-step with the rest of the quartet. He gained in precision and audibility during the subdued Allegretto, but was outshone by the Igor Naidin’s full-bodied viola, as Ambramenkov slipped a bit in the Allegro. The quartet managed to rein itself in for the finale, which began mysteriously and then progressed to the tango-like colors of the rondo and into the more subdued territory of the gentle and quick-footed final coda.
The Große Fuge opens with a macabre theme, played in unison by the quartet, which the Borodin players plunged into energetically. For some reason, however, much of this oddly structured work (not your traditional fugue) sounded muddled and lackluster, as if the musicians were tightly coiled up. They made the work sound terribly stuffy and one wished they would loosen up. That wish was granted - belatedly - in the finale, the only fugal movement where the opening theme is restated and gives way to an brisk and lively scherzo, a breathe of fresh air in an otherwise airless performance.
Expectations ran high for the program’s second half, Shostakovich’s final String Quartet, number 15 in E-Flat minor. From early on the Borodin formed a close relationship with Shostakovich (who died in 1975), who personally supervised their study of his string quartets. (They were the first ensemble to record his complete String Quartets). Wriiten a year before the composer’s death, the Quartet No. 15 is something of a personal requiem and the musicians gave it a deeply-affecting and powerful performance. Of the works on the program, it most clearly demonstrated their strengths as an ensemble. They navigated the turbulent and agonizingly thin textures of the oddly shaped work (five movements) with remarkable coherence and agility. The only point on which they could be faulted was in their request that the house lights be shut off for the performance, while they were bathed in bluish light, a measure intended, no doubt, to create an somber mournful effect that was more than communicated by itself.
The spirit of successfully varied programming came to an abrupt end with Saturday night’s performance by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of the eminently talented American conducer Alan Gilbert. Those looking for coherence in the evening’s programming would have been sorely disappointed. For the first half, the orchestra was joined by the stunning Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter in a recital of lieder by Scandinavian composers, including Sibelius, Stenhammar and Benny Andersson, of Abba fame.
Von Otter, now 55, sang with warmth, clarity and precision, her rich mezzo sounding both youthful and mature. In the seven selections she sang, she wrapped her voice around pieces that were folksy and others that were operatic. “The Forest is Asleep,” by Hugo Alfvén sounded like a gentle lullaby with its delicate, subtle harmonies. And the “Echo Nymph” by Sibelius, was poisitively Mahlerian, bursting with exuberance and elegiac lovliness. The orchestra backed her up amply and admirably, managing to showcase their musical strength while letting von Otter shine brilliantly. The atmosphere of gentle lyricism and sobriety was invaded by indulgence and schmaltz with the final song on the program, “At Home” from the Swedish musical Kristina fran Duvemala, by Benny Andersson. Von Otter seized a microphone and introduced the song, wherein Kristina, a Swedish immigrant to America, remember wistfully the home she’s left behind. The amplified von Otter was accompanied by an electric keyboard and the orchestra, which provided generous cymbal clashes. From a singer whose reparatory highlights includes Octavian in Rosenkavalier and the title role of Pelléas et Mélisande, such kitsch and sappiness seemed like sacrilege.
After intermission came the real crux of the program: a spirited if somewhat misguided performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. The dynamic Gilbert led a greatly expanded orchestra in a reading that walked a precarious line between uncluttered restraint and overblown indulgence. While not entirely successful in this endeavor, Gilbert did manage to illuminate certain complexities of the intricate score and lead the players in a rousing 80-minute performance, punctured by scattered applause between movements (a Swedish custom perhaps?).
The slow, mournful trumpet that opens the Funeral March of the first movement sounded unusually full and drew out its rests , setting up the symphony’s emotional content in a very calculated manner. That element of melodic and rhythmic precision was a constant during the entire performance. Even at it’s most impassioned and unhinged, Gilbert seemed expose the music’s inner mechanisms to inspection. The result was a very clean performance replete with sublime moments, but one that never was able to match the emotional impact of a performance like Bernstein’s. Many of the orchestra’s eruptions �” Mahlerian orgasms, as I like to term them �” seemed thin and insubstantial, achieving great volume without being truly full. The brass regularly overpowered the strings, and the percussion could be shocking at times. The third movement was taken at a protracted tempo that made everything sound labored and laborious. At times, the brass held their notes longer than expected, while the strings sounded unusually clipped. The famous fourth movement Adagietto was arguably the most successful element of the performance and boasted a clear, rich harp. While no doubt soothing, the piece never slipped into sentimentality. One got more that sense of dreamy poignancy than gut-wrenching yearning. At times, however, Gilbert seemed to be going for a warmth that the players couldn’t give him, possibly due to their native climate.
