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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Juggling Barber and Beethoven November 9, 2001
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By Jerry Kuderna
The Oakland East Bay Symphony opened their season at the Paramount Theater with a premiere, a revival and a classic. Maestro Michael Morgan took his group into the post-September 11th musical world with pieces that both looked straight into the abyss and proffered the possibility of solace. The concert also showed how the meaning of even familiar works can vary according to the context in which they are heard.
The featured work was Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto, composed for the pianist John Browning in 1962. It was to be a no-double-octaves-barred vehicle needing consultation with Vladimir Horowitz to verify that some demands the composer made on the soloist were beyond the powers of mortal pianists. Even so, the quantity of notes sometimes obscures rather than enhances the craftsmanship and taste which are otherwise so evident in this moving work with its powerful and finely crafted score. Tian Ying, the brilliant Shanghai-born pianist was more than up to the technical demands of the music.
As a virtuoso showpiece, the concerto still delivers a punch. The first movement is built on just a few motives, Barber getting the most out of his materials. By beginning with an anxious soliloquy from the solo piano, a kind of musical "to be or not to be," he sets the tone for the whole work. It opens a dialogue in which the solo instrument is basically at odds with the orchestra, in the concerto tradition from Brahms to Elliott Carter. (The latter comparison would probably not have pleased the composer, who looked more to the Russians for his models.)
The slow movement, an unabashedly lyrical Canzona, has a kind of spaced-out dreaminess in which the theme and accompaniment are the same melody played at different speeds. It was given a lovely reading here, making the most of its tender melancholy. It would be easy to dismiss the five-eight rhythm and the insistent theme of the last movement as "catchy" were it not for the overwhelming fury which it generates.
Michael Morgan rightly viewed the Barber as the proper emotional climax of the program and from this viewpoint he was right to conclude the program with it, even if it meant leaving the audience with post-traumatic stress. Had he played the Beethoven "Pastorale" symphony after the concerto instead of in the first half, it might have better served the audience spiritually, its fourth movement (fifth if you count the storm separately), the "Song of Thanksgiving," being one of the truly reassuring moments in all of music. Placing it last might also have led to a better performance of that well-known and deceptively tricky symphony. With a little more attention to the frequent pianissimos in the work, Morgan might have made the final fortissimo at the end of the symphony even more surprising and conclusive. The program began with This Is Not Silence by the 28-year-old Canadian, Brian Current. What the Beethoven and Barber have in common, however different their ends, is an economy of means. Current produced a riot of sound which included some ingenious effects such as an accordion-like lion's roar that was used as a kind of wind machine, after which the winds of Beethoven's countryside seemed pretty tame. The piece explored the boundaries of chaos; and its sound and fury seemed to this listener the ideal precursor to the Barber concerto. (Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College and is a host (with Sarah Cahill) of the Berkeley TV program, Stop, Look, and Listen.) ©2001 Jerry Kuderna, all rights reserved |
