Vienna Philharmonic predictably brilliant at Carnegie Hall
Gustavo Dudamel at work. Photo by Sandra Bracho.
7:56 am Oct. 4, 20105
The meat of any Carnegie Hall season is visits from the traveling ensembles of the world, which Carnegie jauntily calls the International Festival of Orchestras.
The Berlin Philharmonic is taking this season off, but the Vienna Philharmonic came to New York last week for a four-show stand, ending yesterday, to open the hall's season. They arrived with two of the biggest conductors in classical music—Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who did the first two concerts, and Gustavo Dudamel, who closed out the run.
The shift from the 80-year-old Harnoncourt to the 29-year-old Dudamel seemed to point the orchestra toward the future. (That impression was encouraged by one violinist—seemingly even younger than Dudamel—who kept bopping along and grinning while the rest of the orchestra went about its business with the more usual sober intensity.) If you needed any supporting anecdote for this symbolic transition, Harnoncourt dropped his score near the end of one of his concerts, flipping through it for a few awkward seconds to find his place. Dudamel didn't use a score at all.
The Vienna Phil, 168 years old (155 of those without female members), is the world's most legendary orchestra, and its reputation—for impeccable ensemble, velvety string playing, and tremendous power—is supported not just by live performances, but by some of the greatest recordings in music history: Bernstein's Brahms symphonies, several cycles of Beethoven symphonies, the groundbreaking Solti Ring, Kleiber's Marriage of Figaro. It's a reputation that can lead to impossible expectations, since the Vienna Phil is, at the end of the day, an orchestra, albeit a very, very good one.
The programming was a whole lot of the same. You don't go to a Vienna Phil concert for new music—you go for authentic performances of the Central European classics. But last year, the Berlin Philharmonic did Schoenberg: it's certainly not impossible to stretch the boundaries a little.
Opening night this year was all-Beethoven: the seventh symphony and the first piano concerto. The second Harnoncourt concert featured Smetana's series of sumptuous tone poems, Ma vlast. So far, so good. But things went a bit off the rails when Dudamel planned his first concert for Saturday night. The program reads like a joke: the overture to Rossini's La gazza ladra, Orbon's Tres versiones sinfonicas, Bernstein's Divertimento for Orchestra, Ravel's Pavane pour une infante defunte and his famous "Bolero." All these pieces are fine ones, but jammed into just over an hour and a half (with intermission), it's a mishmash. Given the Vienna Philharmonic for just two nights, is this really what you'd have them do?
Sunday's matinee was a program more suited to the orchestra's history and talents, but also (not coincidentally) a rather more staid one: Brahms' "Tragic Overture," Schumann's Cello Concerto, and Dvorak's New World Symphony, with the waltz from Bernstein's Divertimento as an encore.
There were extraordinary moments. The string playing was as masterful and shiny as they say. In Ma vlast, the pizzicati—notes that are plucked on the instrument rather than bowed—weren't even audible; they were palpable, almost subconscious. In the Schumann concerto, the orchestra's principal cellist paired gorgeously with Yo-Yo Ma in the duet sections. And the Dvorak symphony, though Dudamel's tempi sometimes felt too extreme, was as big and dramatic as it should be. If I found myself wanting even more at the climaxes, particularly from the brass, it was probably because I wanted an orchestra I was imagining in my mind's ear rather than one in the real world. As far as pure sound goes, this band did things that we don't often hear in New York.
As far as what we do often hear in New York, how does the New York Philharmonic, certainly an excellent orchestra but, at least traditionally, not classed in the same league as Berlin or Vienna, fit into all this? Does it irk them that the European ensembles fly in for a week at a time and get to prance around for a couple of concerts as "the world's greatest orchestras"? From listening to a couple of these Vienna concerts, they really do have extraordinary qualities: the ensemble playing, those pizzicati, the way that the sound feels both transparent and solid.
Part of this is doubtless the effect of Carnegie Hall, which has better acoustics than Avery Fisher Hall, the New York Philharmonic's home, and is also a generally more pleasant place to see a concert. That's why it will be useful to see the New York Phil when they travel downtown to Carnegie on Nov. 12, with a program far more intriguing than any offered this week. Alan Gilbert will conduct Beethoven's massive violin concerto and then follow it with John Adams' Harmonielehre, which pairs Romantic impulses with a Minimalist musical vocabulary. Here are two works—composed two centuries apart—with much to say to one another. It's a clean, elegant program, not cluttered like Dudamel's Saturday concert, and with far more to think about than any of the Vienna shows.
Ummmmm, during their last stand at Carnegie Hall -- in January of this year -- the Vienna Philharmonic did a Schoenberg piece in each of their three concerts, as well as pieces by Webern and Boulez. Those concerts were conducted by Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez. It just depends on who the conductors are.
That's true, and it's true that conductors set the programs and emphasize different aspects of the orchestra's mission, but I would say that those concerts were the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the orchestra's programming, particularly on its international tours. And I might add that, while Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez are undoubtedly challenging to an audience expecting, say, Brahms and Dvorak, they are works that are the better part of a century old at this point. Harmonielehre is from 1985.
The more interesting, related question is about Gustavo Dudamel: why is he being touted as a galvanizing, innovative force with the potential to shape classical music's future when his programming is as conservative as that of a conductor nearly triple his age?
Vienna's programming has been oriented mostly around their core repertoire in the 21 years or so that they have been doing annual visits to New York City, but there are exceptions. The Boulez piece performed last year is barely older than the Adams you mention, two years before that Gergiev performed mostly French and Russian music (though nothing more modern that La Mer), and I recall hearing Ozawa play Takemitsu as well as Muti and Solti both conducting Stravinsky with them, and Bernstein brought his Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs. Recent music is not really represented much, though. In the end, they mostly bring staple repertoire here because that is what most of us want them to play, because they do it with such a distinctive sound and style.
Dudamel is young, and he is still performing the core repertory for the first time in many cases. He is also conducting pieces by Adams, Messiaen, Mackey, Golijov, Gubadailina, Lieberson, and Gorecki with the LA Phil this spring, so he isn't really that conservative.
Thank you for this. It's true that Dudamel is doing more interesting things in L.A., and I wish he had brought more of that spirit to his recent New York visits. Both these Vienna concerts and his tour with the L.A. Phil in the spring felt programmed by rote. I certainly appreciate Vienna's concentration on their core rep; my main issue with Dudamel's program on Saturday is that it was silly, not that it consisted solely of staples.
As a clarification, the Boulez piece that Vienna performed last season, "Notations," was composed in 1945, and orchestrated more recently.
The violinist you refer to is Christoph Koncz, whom I interviewed for a Times piece on the youth craze in classical music (archived at http://www.beyondcriticism.com/7052/when-the-kids-come-out-to-play.) Point of interest: he appeared onscreen as a child actor in THE RED VIOLIN, but the violinist on the soundtrack was Joshua Bell (who attended opening night).