The ability to program an interesting concert is one of the
less-celebrated weapons in a conductor’s arsenal. On Thursday night, Rochester
Philharmonic Orchestra Music Director Ward Stare’s programming was inspired.
The conductor paired Rachmaninoff’s “The Isle of the Dead” – Russian
late-Romanticism par excellence – with the work that is still the coolest kid
in the modernist class, Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”
These two works indeed have almost nothing in common, but
they did bookend an engrossing concert. Add in a favorite soloist, pianist Jon Nakamatsu, in a delightful performance of Beethoven’s
Second Concerto, and you have quite a satisfying menu.
Like Beethoven’s Ninth and a few other standard repertoire
works, a performance of “The Rite of Spring” is always an event. This 1913
ballet score no longer causes riots when it’s performed, as it reportedly did
at its premiere. It’s a pity; I’d kind of like to see a ruckus at an RPO
concert.
Now more than 100 years since it was written, Stravinsky’s “Rite”
is a beloved piece, which is odd for a ballet depicting a human sacrifice. I
certainly love it. Ward Stare certainly does too, though his cold, objective
interpretation might be described as tough love. This approach would not work
for Beethoven’s Ninth, but it’s just fine for Stravinsky, whose musical
objectivity yields beauty.
“The Rite of Spring” abounds with first-chair solos, and the
RPO’s playing of them was beautiful and detailed – highlighted by Matthew
McDonald’s reading of the bassoon solo, which gets the piece off to such an
arresting start. Another poignant moment was the quiet, syncopated duet for
muted trumpets in Part II, with amazingly focused pianissimo playing from Herb
Smith and Paul Shewan.
The appeal of “The Rite of Spring” is not just in the rhythms,
but also in the Russian folk-inspired melodies, in which a few notes twist and
turn within narrow intervals. Just don’t expect to hear them on soaring
violins: The melodic interest is almost entirely in the wind and brass
sections. The RPO string section seemed to enjoy playing all its slashing,
crunchy chords Stravinsky seems to use the strings almost as percussion instruments.
As for the percussion, it was startlingly precise, and indeed, just plain
startling in places – all to the good in this piece.
The RPO does not play this piece all that often, and last
night’s performance faltered here and there. In Part II’s “Evocation and Ritual
of the Ancestors,” we heard a jarring measure or two that could only be
described as a near-train wreck.
Stare and the orchestra quickly got back on track, however. The
brief mishap apparently energized them, since the piece’s conclusion was very
exciting and very accurate. Tentative moments aside,
once this “Rite of Spring” hit its last shrieking chord, I’d have been happy to
sit through it again, immediately.
Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky only met once, during their
mutual exiles in Beverly Hills in the 1940’s. They interacted cordially then,
and on this program their music interacted very effectively, as Stare balanced
the barbaric yawp of “The Rite” with Rachmaninoff’s lusciously morose “The Isle
of the Dead” – two works written a few years apart that could hardly be more
different. Stravinsky once sniffed that Rachmaninoff the composer was “a
painter in oils,” and in fact this tone poem, written in 1907, was inspired by
a famous, death-haunted painting showing a soul being rowed to a mysterious
island in a tiny boat.
Rachmaninoff’s orchestral color scheme here is dark, darker,
darkest, and the mood is obsessively melancholy. The opening, evoking a boat’s
oars constantly dipping into deep waters, is in a seesawing 5/8 time signature.
There is a bit of respite in the contrasting lyrical section – perhaps a dead
soul reflecting on the past life – a tremendous climax, and at the very end,
the “Dies Irae” chant from the Mass for the Dead. The
journey is over.
This item is definitely not in the RPO’s heavy rotation, but the
orchestra played it handsomely, in an interpretation whose dark veneer was
perhaps more elegiac than powerfully tragic.
As writers of program notes never tire of pointing out,
Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto is not actually his second, but his first. It
is also routinely described as the most conventional of Beethoven’s piano
concertos. It is definitely not heaven-storming Beethoven, but it is an imaginative
and substantial piece. The great pianist Glenn Gould called it “remarkable,”
and if you need more proof, Beethoven himself played it frequently in his early,
piano-virtuoso years.
The Second Piano Concerto also strikes me as a work that is
smack in the middle of Jon Nakamatsu’s sweet spot as
an interpreter. “Elegant” can be a two-edged adjective in describing a
performance; Nakamatsu’s finely judged reading of
this concerto was not only drop-dead elegant, but also full of Beethoven’s
signature energy. The pianist added just enough percussiveness to lyrical
passages to keep them from drooping, and his playing of the “Adagio” was
hypnotic, particularly at the end: wonderfully focused and wonderfully poetic.
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2019.
