Access Atlanta > Arts > Our Reviews > Archives > 2005 > January > 20
Thursday, January 20, 2005
ASO, Runnicles in Music from Home
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. (Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.) www.atlantasymphony.org
Concert Review
Music of home — the place you come from — informed the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s concert Thursday evening. It was a theme constructed by Donald Runnicles, the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, who was making his first Atlanta appearance of the season.
Music is supposed to be the universal language. Too often, however, that’s merely a slogan for suppressing valuable differences. To learn German or Farsi requires a rewiring of one’s brain, just as a flutist thinks about music in subtle but significantly different ways from a pianist, or as an English composer accesses music differently from a Czech.
Runnicles, a Scotsman, opened the concert with “An Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise,” written in 1984 by Peter Maxwell Davies, an Englishman, now 70, who decades ago settled in the rugged Orkney Islands off the Scottish coast.
Max, as he’s known, is a real character on the British music scene. A maverick composer, he’s also a shrewd self-promoter — see his Web site, music.maxopus.com — who never misses a chance for a “hook” to catch the audience’s ear and eye.
This 15-minute “Wedding” travels a narrow path between celebrating folk culture and sinking into nationalistic Scottish kitsch. Treading that line is part of the fun.
The music follows a rustic wedding ceremony, centered around a stiff-legged dance rhythm. Max’s scene painting is so deft that you can practically feel the soggy peat earth underfoot. The oboe and violin have declamatory solo passages, and we can imagine the village old-timers retelling stories everyone on the island has heard a thousand times before.
Soon the rhythm starts falling apart, and the wedding party passes out drunk. Then — surprise — a bagpiper in full kilt regalia (here played by Scott Long) marches into the concert hall to announce the dawn. Runnicles had the ASO play it earnestly. It hardly seemed like a novelty piece at all.
For Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, “home” is the rock-steady foundation laid by Haydn and Mozart — a base from which Beethoven could explore new ideas and new levels of intellectual energy.
The soloist, Swiss pianist Andreas Haefliger, is a musician of pleasing clarity and elegance. For his first notes, he entered with such classical rectitude that the Steinway almost sounded like an antique fortepiano.
Remarkably, Haefliger made Beethoven’s cadenzas sound like freshly composed music. In the long Largo movement, the pianist sang in limpid counterpoint with the orchestra, which throughout played with both lightness and gravity. The cantering Rondo finale had a strong breeze at its back. It was a joyous, in-the-moment romp.
Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony speaks the composer’s native Czech through a standard 19th-century Viennese symphonic model. The effect is as if the city dweller visited the countryside and wrote home, “The villagers here are so charming, so authentic!”
Like most virtuosic American orchestras, the ASO aims for uniform tonal polish — a far different sound from Dvorak’s ideals, where woodwinds are woodier and darker, the brass more rude, the strings have a warm, gritty core. Thus our orchestra, too, plays from the perspective of its own home, interpreting everything on the program with its own sonic vocabulary and innate sense of style.
Runnicles had a sure grasp of what is ultimately a cosmopolitan idiom, and his interpretation sang and stomped and seemed at once coarse and refined. Its best moments were exhilarating.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Classical Music
