|
SYMPHONY REVIEW
Powerful But Crude
23 November, 2001
|
By Michelle Dulak
When guest conductor Bernhard Klee ventured out onto the stage at Davies Symphony Hall Friday night, he was obviously upset by the absence of a protective rail around the podium. By the second half the rail was there, but the conductor's stand was gone — Klee conducted Dvorak's Seventh Symphony from memory.
It was a strange program all round — a forty-year-old piece by a Czech dissident composer, an underplayed Dvorak symphony, and — the “chicken in the pot” — a renowned violinist in one of the most popular of all violin concertos.
Vadim Repin was a student of Zakhar Bron, a product of the same phenomenal Novosibirsk violin studio that brought us Maxim Vengerov (along with a host of other extraordinary violinists that don't have major-label record contracts). He is barely thirty years old, and I was alarmed to see him growing so cynical so quickly.
Repin is capable of an uncannily seductive and mobile sound, as anyone who heard his guest performance (in Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence) with the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Players a couple of years back can attest. But his Bruch Concerto No. 1 was callous, perfunctory, and sometimes brutal. It was shocking to hear so gifted a musician relying so much on the virtuoso's generic “hot sound,” and missing so many opportunities for warmth, intimacy, expansiveness, individuality. The quasi-improvisatory passage leading into the slow movement was a case in point. Repin shot through it at a blistering pace, running up the G string by way of gratuitous bravado. It was impressive but cold, and it suggested a contempt for the piece that the rest of the performance only confirmed. The Bruch is no deep masterpiece, to be sure, but it dances and it sings, and it lives by song and by dance. Shut these off and what you have is a gymnastic routine, nothing more. Repin, Friday night, was a very powerful gymnast. Gymnasts have compulsory and free routines. If Repin hurried through the “compulsory” Bruch, it might have been only to get to the “free” encores, where he did show what he could do. The first movement of Ysaye's fourth solo-violin sonata was astonishing — stern, confident, technically immaculate, and full of all that fluid, vivid color that the Bruch needed but didn't get. This was a violinist that I would love to hear tackling the Bach Sonatas & Partitas. (The trick of hitting and sustaining only one note of a four-note chord, so essential to “modern” Bach playing, is one he performs with no apparent strain at all.) The other encore was a piece of fluff on a Venetian folksong, full of left-hand pizzicato, accompanied by the orchestra's strings, plucking away with bows on stands.
The opener was Variations on a Theme of Mahler by Jan Klusák, a piece dating from the early 1960s. The extensive program notes, by James Keller, describe Klusák as a sort of low-key dissident, one who got in some trouble for flirting with serialism and other “decadent” compositional tendencies, but stuck it out through the whole Communist period and beyond. This Variations seems to be his best-known piece (even the perfunctory article in the old New Grove manages to mention it). I hope that there are more and better pieces awaiting attention. The Variations begins with a few disjointed motifs or signals from the sections of the orchestra, then settles into nothing less than a literal, note-for-note performance of the first third of the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Then the variations kick in — everything from your standard “wrong-note” rewrite, to a vast chromatic morass from which Mahlerian turn-figures surface every so often, to a sardonic little waltz, to a final variation (all too obviously meant as a sort of apotheosis) in which the “theme” is distorted in the most naive way by octave-transpositions and the like.
To my ears it was crude and even cruel. An audience familiar with, comfortable with, the Adagietto had just about enough time to settle into the familiar music when the piece suddenly blew that whole world to smithereens. But the time and place of the composition complicate things strangely. This piece would have made sense (if a hard, sneering sort of sense) as a recent postmodernist's attack on Mahlerian sentiment. As a Czech modernist's tribute to Mahler it is bizarre. And it cries out for context: Did Klusák's audience know Mahler? Was he being performed? Was the Adagietto quoted at such length because the audience could not have known it well otherwise? We take it for granted that everyone knows this piece, but forty years ago it was not so. I am trying to do justice to a piece that struck me, in the playing, as unbearably silly. Oh, it was competently enough put together, and the bits furthest from the “theme” (like that waltz) were effective. But the whole project was petty. And ill-advised: putting Mahler's original right there in the piece next to the new variations invited, shall we say, invidious comparisons. The Dvorak Seventh Symphony that followed intermission was actually very fine, bar a few ensemble mishaps. The strings and the brass were dense and bold, and there was so much to enjoy in the mere sound of the orchestra that I scarcely cared who was running the show or how it was done. In fact Klee conducted sensibly and well, urging the string sections in particular to full power, though at times his vast, sweeping beat can't have been terribly helpful to the orchestra. (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 |
