The RPO’s Conductor Laureate continues to earn his laurels.
Christopher Seaman’s annual visits to the podium have already become highlights
of each season. He has set an agreeable habit of programming the kinds of
pieces he likes best, from Mozart to Brahms and a bit beyond. This week’s
program was a generous serving in his way with repertoire that made Seaman so
popular in the first place: a brilliant and rarely performed English tone poem;
one of the most delightful of French piano concertos, with another local
favorite, Jon Nakamatsu, as the soloist; and a still-startling
Stravinsky ballet score.
The southern location celebrated in Edward Elgar’s “In the
South” is Italy, that sunny country where Englishmen of a certain station have
often gone to warm up their bodies and souls. Elgar, who went there with his
family in 1903, was no exception, and his postcard home is a really dazzling
tone poem that out-Strausses Richard Strauss and
makes an ideal concert opener.
Besides its brilliant writing for every section of the
orchestra, “In the South” has the breadth and depth of Elgar’s best music —
amid all the tumult, the most memorable section is the slow section, which
features a sweetly melancholy solo for viola, which was played with winning
simplicity by Melissa Matson. And nobody needs to be told how simpatico Seaman
finds Elgar’s music; this was an authoritative performance.
Seaman was fond of presenting French music during his 13-year
tenure with the RPO and had an ideal way with it, giving just the right light,
lucid touch to works by Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Fauré,
and other French masters. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote his G minor piano concerto
in two weeks, and reportedly gave its premiere without practicing it much. Jon Nakamatsu seems to have had plenty of practice time, and
gave a rip-roaring, yet elegant account of this most likeable work. Despite its
occasional evocations of Bach and Beethoven, it is mostly high-gloss surface. Nakamatsu is a highly polished pianist who knows how to inject
just enough passion into this delicately balanced music without making it
topple.
Pianist and conductor caught the tempest-in-a teapot quality
of the finale, a kind of infernal tarantella, very nicely. (If Nakamatsu and Seaman ever wanted to try Saint-Saëns’
equally brilliant and rarely-done Fourth Piano Concerto, it would be welcomed —
by me, at least.)
“The Firebird” is the Stravinsky ballet everybody likes, and
his “Rite of Spring” has earned its bona fides in the gallery of permanent
avant-garde masterpieces of music — but I confess I find this composer’s “Petrushka” as amazingly virtuosic and imaginative as either
of the others.
You can almost smell the vodka and the leather boots in this
story of love among the marionettes who perform at a St. Petersburg fair in the
19th century. It’s a tragedy, actually, as the puppet Petrushka
is killed by a Blackamoor, his rival for the favors of a Ballerina; but
Stravinsky’s music is so extroverted and so detailed that a performance of the
entire ballet score is exhilarating rather than disturbing, in fact it is one
of the most dazzlingly kinetic works in the orchestral repertory.
It seems to be a favorite of Seaman’s; he conducted it with
the RPO at least twice before, and it was a treat to hear it for a third. Conductor
and orchestra savored all of Stravinsky’s garish colors, boisterous humor, and
splintered rhythms, with a particularly vivid rendering of the string of
folk-based dances in the final tableau.
Stravinsky’s orchestration remains arrestingly brilliant,
even in this 1947 slimming-down of the score. Every section gets a workout, and
there was standout solo work from pianist Joseph Werner (who “plays” Petrushka) and trumpeter Douglas Prosser.
At the conclusion of “Petrushka,”
Seaman expressed his desire not to leave the audience “holding a dead puppet”
and swung the orchestra into an encore. I will not disclose it and possibly spoil
Saturday night’s surprise, but it was a lollipop from another Russian ballet,
and it sent the audience out humming. It also found the orchestra members
playing wreathed in smiles — and how often do you see that?
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2015.
