The blog is going away but the reviews are not. You can find them here in the online print edition.
Home > ATLarts > Archives > 2008 > February > 11 > Entry
ASO Soars on Safe Picks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Classical music critic Pierre Ruhe was ill and unable to attend the ASO’s recent performances. The AJC sent guest critic James L. Paulk to the symphony’s Feb. 9 performance. Here’s his review:
If the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has only one friend (Tom) on its MySpace.com profile, it’s not for lack of trying. Programming, for example, has become quite progressive since Robert Spano took the helm. It has leapt to the front, at least in terms of playing new American composers (alas, no Europeans, but that’s another story). Its most recent concert featured two of America’s most popular, and safe, living composers.
John Corigliano’s “Elegy for Orchestra,” was written as incidental music for a play and then expanded into one of his earliest full orchestra scores (1966). Eclipsed by his later works, it’s interesting more as a peek into his development. Here he’d already established the neo-Romantic style that looked back to Barber and Bernstein. Spano dispatched it nicely, and tThe stage was set for an evening dealing with despair and sadness.
Having heard John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls” last season, conducted by the composer himself, patrons might be forgiven for asking why they were getting it again so soon. Are the musicians so limited that they must fall back on material from recent concerts? The ASO will perform Adams’ opera, “Doctor Atomic,” next season, so it’s not as though he’s being ignored here.
That said, this was an extraordinary performance.It’s a tough piece. But the ensemble learned it last season and this one was recorded for broadcast, which helps everyone stay focused. So this was a chance to hear the ASO and chorus at their best, which is quite good indeed.
The work was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to commemorate 9/11. A New Yorker back then, I attended the premiere in September of 2002, and found the piece and the performance devastating and profound. We were all quite fragile, living in the shadow of that time.
Further removed, we experience it differently. Spano seems to know exactly how to handle this. Restraint became the rule.The massive ASO chorus was whisper-quiet at the beginning, building to a powerful climax. Along the way, it was possible to hear clearly the textures of the many tense figures in the orchestra as well as the plaintive words of the chorus: names of victims and haunting phrases from the missing person posters that dotted the city when this was first performed. Even the Gwinnett Youth Singers, the weakest link in the ASO team, were on their best behavior here, their voices soaring sweetly.
This work also uses recorded city sounds, perfectly balanced and expensively produced. This isn’t Adams at his best, but it’s an emotionally powerful piece of history, and this performance was clean enough to record in one take, if they wanted to do so.
The balance of the evening was devoted to the kinds of works that “put the fannies in the seats.” Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” is one of those pieces that we might like better if it wasn’t played quite so often. Still, it has a power to connect directly to the soul. And it can convey a feeling of deep sadness like few things ever written. In this reading, Spano exposed the rhythmic underpinnings of the piece, so that it had more of a feeling of propulsion and of space. But this is a work that needs a certain dramatic sweep in order to hardwire itself to the heartstrings, and that element was missing.
With Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, the challenge is to find something new to say. Especially when recording it, as is the case here (though apparently just the “Funeral March”). And Spano, surprisingly, might have found that with this performance.
It was clear from the beginning that this would be a masculine “Eroica.” As with the Barber, but with a fuller orchestra (Barber used only the strings), Spano focused on the structure of the piece, with a driving rhythm, tempi that were often a bit peppy, and, again, a restrained approach to the swooning strings. The effect was a sound bordering at times on militaristic. Appropriate perhaps for Napoleon, who was apparently the original inspiration for the work, before he proclaimed himself Emperor and Beethoven had a change of heart.
This was a clear and remarkably focused performance. The horns behaved nicely, and the oboe solos were sensitively played. The slow movement really built up majestically to the Funeral March, giving it a wallop that made sense of the whole approach.
Audience response in Atlanta is so uniform that it’s hard to read. I sometimes fantasize about what it would take for a local classical performance not to get a standing ovation. But, hey, they seemed happy. It was heartening to see a number of 20- and 30-somethings in the audience, though one in front of me was busy with her text messages for most of the night, a behavior that apparently comes with this demographic. Perhaps she’ll join Tom on the MySpace blog.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Classical Music
Comments
Commenting is now closed for this entry.
By k
February 11, 2008 1:32 PM | Link to this
This is different than the review published in the print edition (at least in its online form), but I wanted to correct a factual error found in both versions: The Adams was recorded in sessions on Sunday, not live during the performances.
By musicfan
February 14, 2008 1:35 PM | Link to this
We heard the ASO perform the AdamsCoriglianoBarberBeethoven concert on Thursday and were amazed at the exceedingly grumpy patrons. They couldn’t have been clearer in their dislike of the Adams and Corigliano if they had pitched tomatoes at Spano. Does this happen often? I’ve been told that Atlanta audiences don’t like anything that deviates from the old warhorses; true?