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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Orchestral Passion, Even In The Back Stands
October 14, 2001
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By Michelle Dulak
Anyone who has seen both American and touring European orchestras in concert will have noticed the difference in pre-concert behavior. The American orchestras come onstage well before the start time and noisily warm up. The European ones leave the stage entirely empty until two or three minutes before the concert is slated to begin. Then they file on decorously, tune very briefly, and play.
American passion and impetuosity versus European reserve and formality, right? The bold New World that doesn't stand on ceremony, and the tired-but-proud Old World that wouldn't deign to stand on anything less? Well, actually, no.
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra's visit to Davies Symphony Hall (under the baton of its current, and the SF Symphony's former, director, Herbert Blomstedt) put paid to such nonsense. Sunday night, the Old-World decorum stopped just after the tuning.
There are various ways to tackle Brahms' Fourth Symphony. You can stress the lyricism (it is always there, even in the sternest Brahms), or the violence, or just step back and look at the thing as a structure, confident that it will take the scrutiny. Blomstedt's Fourth was on the ascetic side — traditional places for “special moments” were passed by. With another orchestra the same tempos, the same inflections might have sounded nervous or driven. But this orchestra! Maybe the best way to put it is that I've sometimes seen a group working full-out to a single purpose like this, but never a group so large. Take the tightest, most intense chamber orchestra you know, and multiply by four. Or your favorite string quartet, and multiply by fifteen. The string sound was incredible, concentrated but not edgy, the sound of a lot of people single-mindedly doing one thing. And if you looked at the orchestra you could see it happening: violinists and violists (even to the very backs of the sections) passionately, physically digging into their instruments; basses swaying (as my companion at the concert put it) “like cornstalks in the wind,” but ever to a purpose.
That commitment meant a certain occasional sloppiness in detail. You don't sign on for caution, you don't get your immaculate final chords. But if this is the tradeoff, bring on the slop! (Beethoven's Egmont Overture, which was the encore, was much the same — exhilarating and gutsy and a little ragged. It was a tremendous performance, and I would have been as happy to see it at the beginning of the program as at the end.) No doubt much of the audience was there mainly to hear the Brahms, but Nikolaj Znaider's amazing performance of the Nielsen Violin Concerto came first. The piece itself is a decidedly odd puppy. From the virtuoso's viewpoint, the initial signs are good — a slow introduction, sweet and vehement in turn; some good, lyrical tunes (though they don't quite stick in the memory as they ought); and enough violinistic acrobatics to satisfy any player, especially if he's fond of tenths. And a rousing conclusion that will make any audience erupt (as the San Francisco audience did Sunday). Unfortunately that's not the end of the piece, just the end of the movement. Then comes a sort of demented rondo — with its own slow introduction, no less — that's almost as long as the first movement. Nielsen has to have had the finale of the Beethoven violin concerto in his head, but it evidently got combined in some deeply disorienting way with the Rondo-Burleske of the Mahler Ninth, or possibly bits of the Scherzo of the Sixth. Fascinating stuff (here you do get, as you never do in the first movement, a whiff of the later Nielsen who wrote the Flute and Clarinet Concertos), but awfully weird in context. If that first movement could be spun off as a sort of Konzertstück, it might really go somewhere. There are things in it that seem positively amazing for the time (especially the cadenza, which I suspected of poaching from the Ysaye solo sonatas until I checked the dates), and once it gets up to speed, the run to the finish is exhilarating. But as it is, I fear the piece will remain the province of whatever monstrously-gifted players happen to take a fancy to it.
Nikolaj Znaider certainly belongs in the “monstrously-gifted” camp. I suppose I ought to be getting bored with the endless succession of Brilliant Young Violinists (Znaider is in his mid-twenties), but they really aren't all the same. Znaider, a Queen Elizabeth Competition first-prize winner who has already recorded the Nielsen Concerto for EMI, is a magnificent player of the lean-and-lithe sort. He puts out a hell of a big sound, but you don't notice the power half so much as the passion and the humor. His left-hand technique is awesomely clean (no, really, even by BYV standards) and his bowing marvelous. I think it's the bowing that really got me. Znaider has a zest for articulation that put me in mind of a few of my favorite “period” violinists. He knows how much fun can be made out of a flick of the right hand. And he treated the orchestral players as colleagues, leaning toward the cellos here for one passage, towards the first violins there for another, smiling in pure pleasure when the phrase was absolutely together, as it usually was. Readers of reviews must be tired of being told to “look out for” this or that nascent star. Sorry. This one is for real. (Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.) ©2001 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved |