Concert Review: The Mountain of Madness

Daniil Trifonov closes out Rachmaninoff at the Philharmonic.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

The young gun: Daniil Trifonov is set to take over the world
...and just joined the board of the New York Philharmonic.
Photo © 2015 Deutsche Grammophon/Universal Music Group.

It's been a good month for piano aficionados at the New York Philharmonic, where newly minted board member Daniil Trifonov is wrapping up a three-week overview of the career of Sergei Rachmaninoff, the tall, dour Russian virtuoso whose piano music combines lyricism and technical challenges in a way that makes his four concertos the equivalent of an expedition to conquer the Himalayas.

Concert Review: Catching the Waves

The Seattle Symphony plays Spring for Music.
by Paul J. Pelkonen

Conductor Ludovic Morlot in rehearsal.

On Tuesday night, the fourth and final Spring For Music festival--that week-long celebration of of North American orchestras at Carnegie Hall with a dedicated focus on modern and obscure repertory--welcomed the Seattle Symphony for a rare New York appearance. The concert, under the baton of Seattle music director Ludovic Morlot featured the New York premiere of Become Ocean, the work that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music for its composer John Luther Adams.

Concert Review: Who Needs Black Friday?

Ludovic Morolt conducts Harbison's Fourth, Mahler's First.

Composer John Harbison.
 Photo by Kathrin Talbot, © 2010 G. Schirmer and Associates.

James Levine vacated the position of Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in March of this year. But this week's program, conducted by his former assistant Ludovic Morlot, is very much a continuation of the programming idea prevalent in his seven-year tenure.

The program, played to a full Symphony Hall on the afternoon after Thanksgiving, opened with the Fourth Symphony by John Harbison. This was part of a two-year BSO initiative, to perform all of Mr. Harbison's extant symphonies by the end of this season. It will conclude in January with the premiere of his Sixth.

The Fourth is a bleak, unsmiling work in five movements. In his thoughtful program notes, the composer describes the work as a five-movement cure for his Gatsby hangover, following that work's mixed reception in 2000. Indeed, the first movement is jazz-inflected and brassy, almost strident until stopping dead against its own momentum. The second is indecisive, the sound of a man  beginning anew.

The third finds the composer emulating the work of Shostakovich with a dour double scherzo, Complicated dance rhythms tumbling over each other in and effort to express themselves. The funereal Threnody that followed was grim, terse effective. The final movement was bold and determined, the sound of a composer finding his groove, and moving on to what should be a brighter, more optimistic future.

Under Mr. Morolt, the Boston Symphony Orchestra played the Harbison work with taut power. They brought the same quality to the second Suite from Maurice Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloë. The large ensemble tackled these furious rhythms with glee, playing the closing "Danse generale" with gusto. 

The concert concluded with a Mahler First played with bold strokes. Despite a few balky notes from the bassoons, Mr. Morolt summoned the spirit of spring into Symphony Hall, making Mahler's chorales of offstage trumpets and onstage horns come together in a celebratory manner. 

The reeling, wine-tippling peasants of the second movement lurched groggily in. The joy was visible on the faces of the Boston players as they moved into the elegant trio before returning to Mahler's clod-hopping Ländler rhythms. played the famous funeral march, drawn from the children's rhyme "Frere Jacques" before slipping into Jewish wedding music and letting out some very merry sounds from the eight-man horn section.

Those horns move to their feet in the last pages of the tumultous finale, a treacherous, long movement made more difficult by a tricky repeat that forces the orchestra to reprise the entire main theme in a different, higher key Still, the players stood up to the challenge. Mr. Morlot slowed a little in the middle of this movement, but regained his footing and brought the First in with a blaze of sound and a loud, approving applause. 

With stunning playing like this, who needs a door-busting sale to be truly happy?

Concert Review: An Excellent Adventure

Ludovic Morlot conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Ludovic Morlot conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra with pianist Richard Goode.
Photo by Stu Rosner © 2011 The Boston Symphony Orchestra.

On Tuesday night at Symphony Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra offered a program of four works that spanned three centuries and straddled four different genres of concert music. In what has become a pattern in this music director-less season, former BSO assistant Ludovic Morlot (now with the Seattle Symphony) conducted.

The journey began with Berlioz' Roman Carnival overture. Built from the "good parts" of the composer's failed opera Benvenuto Cellini, the work allowed Mr. Morlot to show his conductorial skills. He amassed Berlioz' vast forces, the searching solo for the English horn, chivvying strings and a blaze of brass. Given this performance, a BSO concert performance of the full opera (or at least an act of it) is an interesting idea.

Half the orchestra left, and a piano was moved in for Canadian soloist Richard Goode to play Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25. Mr. Goode played hunched over the keyboard, his shoulder crooked and his lips moving in time with his fingers as he played. Despite this eccentricity (which recalled the mannerisms of Glenn Gould) the soloist played with limpid, sweet tone, using almost no force with Mozart's solo part.

This made a contrast to the Beethovenian force used in the cadenzas, which were Mr. Goode's own. (Mozart's cadenzas are lost.) These interpolated solos in each of the three movements proved thrilling. Mr. Goode seemed more alert in these passages, moving with alacrity up and down the keyboard and expanding on each movement's musical ideas. 

The clock moved forward to the 21st century as the second half of the program, which focused on modern music. Elliott Carter's Flute Concerto had its U.S. premiere in Feb. 2008 at Symphony, with soloist Elizabeth Rowe. She reprised her performace, playing the challenging solos that explore almost all sonic aspects of the flute--with the exception of Jethro Tull-style flutter-tongueing. 

Carter starts with a simple theme and builds from it, backing the soloist with a proportionately small orchestra. Complicated percussion is also featured, with temple and wood blocks and even a metal pipe joining in. Sliding chords in the strings and angular figures for woodwinds and piano anchor the expressive flute part, alternately playful, mournful and stern.  

The repertory moved to the 20th century as the full orchestra returned to play the Suite from Béla Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin. Despite its quaint-sounding title, this is pretty grim stuff. The Suite covers the first two-thirds of the sordid ballet, the tale of a prostitute, a gang of toughs and a spooky, otherworldly client who just won't die like he's supposed to.

Clarinetist William Hudgins represented the dancing prostitute with agile, eloquent soloing over the chugging strings The four-man BSO trombone section outdid themselves, playing the dark two-note theme of the Mandarin with power and menace. Mr. Morlot led a tautly controlled performance of this famous, jagged score. Like most good performances of the Suite, it left one wanting to hear the whole thing.