San Francisco Classical Voice

Kurt Masur

One might expect a touring symphony orchestra to do its best to project a corporate character--an unmistakable, swaggering, confident musical personality. On Sunday, the first of the New York Philharmonic's two concerts in Davies Symphony Hall was somewhat of a surprise. While the orchestra's personality was vivid and unmistakable, it was muted, to an extent, by a conductor who seemed reluctant to let his forces loose. Puzzling reserve and extraordinary eloquence sat side by side throughout the evening.

Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, for example, began inauspiciously. The first movement was rather fast and disquietingly serene. Any number of other conductors would have jumped at the opportunities for rhetorical emphasis that Masur let pass by unremarked. And the playing, even in the loudest passages, struck me as altogether too refined; couldn't even the brass find it in themselves to be vulgar occasionally?

Things changed dramatically with the scherzo. The very opening, with massed cellos and basses in unison, was startling in its sheer sonority. The violin solo that followed shortly after made me re-appraise concertmaster Glenn Dichterow. His solo at the end of the first movement, clotted with vibrato and over-projected, seemed to me to represent all that is worst in the mind-set of orchestral concertmasters. In the scherzo solo, though, that same cloyingly rich tone, combined with a deft bow-arm and a wickedly witty sense of timing, produced a masterpiece of parody. Sandra Church's following flute version of the same music was (as it should be) a deadpan, chaste parody of the parody.

Everything else in the scherzo was, likewise, perfectly calculated, down to the last, faltering attempt of the oboe to start the Trio theme again. And Masur's reticent personality seemed itself transformed by the music; he revealed a gift for comedy and even farce that had not appeared in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the first half. The slow movement that followed, however, put the second movement Scherzo in the shade. Shostakovich's slow movement demands an orchestra with at least two necessary qualities: a string section of great sonority and depth of tone, and wind principals capable of real eloquence. The New York Philharmonic has both, and this performance showed it. The density of the string tone (even in the multiple divisi that Shostakovich demands) was arresting, and the desolate solos that the composer provides for flute, clarinet, and oboe were played with an intensity to pierce the heart.

A couple of weeks ago, Masur stopped a performance of this movement when audience coughing became too much for him, and angrily left the stage. Perhaps those who attended this San Francisco concert had read some of the many reports of this incident in the print media. Or maybe they were influenced by the San Francisco Symphony's new cartoon character, "the Rimsky Korsa-Cougher," whose name was blazoned on the front of the program (in gold, no less), and whose example was supposed to make the audience control its bronchial urges. In any event, the slow movement of the Shostakovich passed by in absolute audience silence; a perfect fusillade of coughing broke loose immediately after it ended.

The finale provided further evidence of Masur's capacity for emotional force. The several passages for strings alone were intense, as they should be, almost to the point of physical pain. And the brass knew well enough how to be vulgar in this movement. There is a dispute about the tempo of the ending of the finale, with some conductors (notably Bernstein, but also apparently Mravinsky, who conducted the premiere) taking the last section at double the speed of others. Masur took the "slow" option, and each bow-stroke really struck like the stab of a weapon.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, in what one suspects was intentional symmetry, occupied the first half. Masur was harshly and unfairly criticized in many quarters for programming a "Beethoven Festival" last year, in which the complete symphonies and many other major works were performed. Our concert life may lack many things (so the argument ran), but it surely doesn't suffer from a lack of Beethoven. The counter-argument seems to me equally strong: If we're getting several Beethoven symphonies a year anyway, why not have them all, and have them concentrated in a series that all interested people can attend?

Masur's was a judicious and perhaps too-cautious Beethoven 5. The "motto" theme in the first movement was allotted a little extra time each time it came, but the orchestra seemed not to know where the time should go, and each statement was not quite together. Elsewhere there was very little in the performance that one could attribute to the naked will of the conductor. Even the farcical stops and starts of the cellos in the trio of the scherzo were performed absolutely deadpan.

Still, it was impossible not to be impressed by the sheer sound of the orchestra. The violas and cellos, together, made the variations of the slow movement a sonorous delight, and it was only later in the symphony that it became clear how much of that rich sonority was due to the violas alone.

Two encores followed the concert. The first was the finale of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for strings--a very long encore, and a peculiar one, I thought, when the wind and brass from the Shostakovich were still on stage. It was an exhilarating performance, though, one that made me lament that the NYP had not taken the whole work on tour. The agility of the strings was matched only by their richness of sound when, at the very end of the movement, they recapitulated the opening of the serenade.

Afterwards Masur, while acknowledging the applause, stepped into the midst of the first violins, and waved to the brass to proceed. Whereupon a quintet's-worth of the NYP brass section, having cleared a floor space while the Tchaikovsky was going on, struck up an uncommonly delightful ragtime number, at one point promenading with seeming nonchalance while they played. To the screams of delight from the audience, Masur (dragging Dichterow by the arm, to forestall further demands for encores) departed.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved