Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; New York; January 11, 2008
When an orchestral program is made up of works by Berlioz and Prokofiev, you know you’re in for a Technicolor treat, and that’s what audiences got at this week’s New York Philharmonic concerts led by the band’s musical director, Lorin Maazel, who has always displayed an affinity for multi-hued music. Berlioz pieces opened both halves of the program and the curtain-raiser, the Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, set the tone for the concert, the orchestra reveling in the primary colors of Berlioz’s orchestration. Here too, as elsewhere in the concert, Avery Fisher Hall’s famous deficiencies played their part, placing a metallic patina on the upper strings in loud passages, rendering climaxes boxy, and congealing full-orchestra fortissimos.
Mezzo Susan Graham was the soloist in the opening number of the second half, Berlioz’s La Mort de Cléopâtre, an early cantata, or as Berlioz called it, a scène lyrique. It was originally submitted for a Prix de Rome competition (it lost; the judges deemed it too bold and radical). It’s not often heard these days, modern audiences being fairly resistant to declamatory works. But on this occasion, with a great singer and orchestra, it made a positive impression. As the doomed Queen, Graham was an intense presence, wholly within the character and putting her warm, sensuous voice to dramatic ends while Maazel and his players conveyed the harmonic adventurousness of the score.
Prokofiev was represented by two works that effectively serve as bookends to his career – the 1952 Seventh Symphony and the Scythian Suite, from 1915. The Symphony can be seen as an exercise in ambiguity; lush Romantic melodies rooted in Russian folk music abound, but are often set in a context of tricky rhythms or slightly ominous bass figures that subvert their apparent simplicity. Somewhat like Shostakovich’s works that also straddle the line between conforming to Soviet ideology and mocking it, the Symphony has plenty of sardonic humor – the second movement’s brass figures, its circus music, and the chaotic closing section. The finale too, can be difficult to bring off, with its surface gaiety undercut by tuba-driven rhythms, a giddy march that keeps slipping into an edgy comment on itself, and the churning basses and insistent rhythms that lend a dangerous edge to the otherwise pleasant warm bath of the melodies.
Maazel and his players brought out many details often obscured in performance, as they did in the final work of the program, the Scythian Suite. This got quite a workout in a muscular performance that featured a rather sluggish Night movement and tested how loud a decibel count the players could deliver (answer: very loud indeed). Enjoyable in itself, the work’s Stravinskyisms are glaring, although some seeds of Prokofiev’s later style protrude and later Hollywood composers ripped off the dramatic opening of its second movement for countless Indian war dances in old Western shoot-em-ups.
Dan Davis