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Review: ASO plays Creston on trombone
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
8 tonight and 8 p.m. Saturday. $10-$58. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
No one is asking that you take sides, of course. These aren’t the presidential debates, but the strifes and scandals of 20th-century music history, played out by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Last week, the ASO’s concert opened with music by Elliott Carter (born 1908), the most formidable and forbidding of the abstract modernist composers. In the 1960s and ’70s, Carter’s reputation and influence was so exalted that a generation of American romantics were forcibly demoted and sent to the land where irrelevant artists dwell. The melody-writers were antediluvian and counter-revolutionary — or so it seemed.
This week, the ASO helped revive a worthy composer from irrelevancy. Paul Creston (1906-1985) didn’t live to see a concert-hall revival of his music, but nowadays you can hear all his important works on CD and, increasingly, experience them live.
Creston’s music is “an embodiment of the affirmative, lyrical, melodic strain that dominated American music in the 1930s and for a time afterward,” wrote critic-conductor Will Crutchfield in an obituary. Creston rightly joins the company of Copland, Piston and Barber.
Creston's 1947 Fantasy for Trombone, one of his best-known works, served to introduce the ASO's principal trombonist, Colin Williams, who joined the orchestra three years ago and is now making his official solo debut.
In the jazzy Fantasy, Williams was heard, finally, to his advantage. In the treacherous Symphony Hall acoustic, the orchestral trombones' warm bass notes get absorbed by the stage walls and the bright high notes get polarized to a blinding glare, like sunlight off a swimming pool.
At stage front, we heard Williams au natural: his clean, “white” tone, with very little vibrato and exceptionally pure and lovely soft notes.
And for the ASO, with their committed playing this week and last, they showed that it's likely the romantic vs. modernist argument will seem quaint in another generation. This would follow the Wagner (progressive) vs. Brahms (retro) debates, which eventually subsided, leaving both men on the winning side. What survives isn't ideology, it's good art.
As an encore, Williams and the orchestra played ‘‘The Blue Bells of Scotland,” an amusing and sentimental work by Arthur Pryor, the trombonist in John Philip Sousa’s band a century ago. Where the Creston was unfailingly polite, Pryor asks the soloist to scale heights, blow elephant calls and raspberries, all accompanied by oom-pah-pahs from the orchestra. Williams breezed through the moto perpetuo variations with mostly machine-drilled aplomb.
On the podium was Alexander Mickelthwate, who had been the ASO’s assistant conductor for the past three years and now holds the same post with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His career is ascending in sure-footed steps. He’s one to watch.
Where Strauss’ tone poem “Don Juan,” which opened the evening, brimmed with energy and daring, Mickelthwate’s reading of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony was architecturally solid and, in the famous funeral march slow movement, emotionally substantial.
Throughout the revolutionary “Eroica,” however, one sensed that the young conductor tried in vain to excite volcanic passions from the musicians. They played well for him but seemed a bit standoffish. Part of the roadblock might have been that Mickelthwate didn’t differentiate moods across the four movements — all were utterly serious and sober. Missing was an arc of a story line, a dark tale with an optimistic ending.
You heard it in the volley of phrases at the start of the finale, which sounded like an engineer’s clean, etched lines rather than a playful game of cat-and-mouse. The interpretation might have profited from a more buoyant spirit. Still, there was chemistry on stage. They have two more concerts, tonight and Saturday, to reach for great music making.
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