Carnegie Hall, New York, Wednesday, April 10, 2002
At the close of Wednesday’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concert at Carnegie Hall, with the 75-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich beaming at his side blowing kisses to all and sundry, Seiji Ozawa led the orchestra and the audience in a rousing, heartfelt rendition of Happy Birthday. It was a well-deserved tribute to the cellist who strode across the musical firmament for half-a-century and, if his stirring performance of the Dvořák Concerto is an accurate indication, is still the reigning master of his instrument. He must have played this work several hundred times over the course of his distinguished career, but there wasn’t the faintest whiff of routine in a warmly intense reading that swept all before it. That is not to deny the inevitable inroads of age, which showed themselves in a slight drying out of his glorious tone, especially in its lower reaches, and in occasional waverings of pitch and a dropped or scanted note or two. But such human failings afflict even younger virtuosos and were insignificant alongside his abundant, still intact energy, brio and communicative skills. And they were doubly insignificant when set alongside playing of such grandeur, nobility and rapt intensity.
After the beautifully shaped orchestral introduction, Rostropovich entered with his familiar big, bold tone resounding throughout the hall, and he shaped the affecting theme with a heartfelt sweetness that left you hanging on every note. In the Adagio, his playing was charged with concentrated passion, and in the Finale, demonstrated that he was still capable of joining virtuosity with feeling. Throughout the Concerto, the orchestra played with refined energy lit from within by magnificent wind and violin solos and Ozawa led with a deft rhythmic touch and idiomatic phrasing that complemented the great cellist.
Rostropovich’s feat was all the more remarkable in that the Dvořák, one of the biggest of concertos, was preceded by a half-hour-long commissioned concerto by Eric Tanguy, a French composer less than half the cellist’s age. It was yet another in a series of over 100 works inspired or commissioned by Rostropovich who premiered the piece, Tanguy’s Second Cello Concerto, in July, 2001. Although not specifically labeled as such, Tanguy seems to have aimed at a portrait of the cellist, its four movements – Very expressive, Passionate, Very mysterious, and Lively – pretty well summarizing key aspects of his playing. It would be nice to be able to report that Tanguy’s Concerto is a success and bound to become a repertory staple, but alas, I cannot. It seems on first hearing like a soliloquy for solo cello with occasional interjections by a superfluous orchestra. It abounds in melodies, some of them of more than passing interest, but Tanguy falls short of his stated goal of each movement – “investigating music of specific character.” The first two movements blend into each other in mood, and the Very Mysterious movement opens with – you guessed it – violin tremolos. The orchestral part is so underwritten as to amount to a disappearing act and while the cello has attractive music that makes interesting demands on the soloist, it’s simply not inventive enough to carry the full load.
The evening’s curtain raiser was a forgettable tribute to Ozawa, John Williams’ For Seiji, premiered by him and the orchestra in 1999 and hardly worth reviving. It’s an episodic, intermittently colorful eight-minute work that sounds like salvaged scraps from Williams’ film scores. A succession of innocuous episodes signifying nothing, its sole virtue is brevity. But no matter; Rostropovich was the concert’s reason for being and his luminous Dvořák its reason for lodging in the memory.
Dan Davis
