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Thursday, February 3, 2005
Abbado and Hahn with the ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Concert Review
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
The program repeats Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 pm. www.atlantasymphony.org.
Perhaps the most essential reason to grab a ticket for this weekend’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts is a chance to hear violinist Hilary Hahn.
Listening to the 25-year-old Philadelphian in Prokofiev’s D Major Violin Concerto, Thursday evening, one had the sudden sensation of seeing new colors, smelling new fragrances.
Unlike most young American fiddlers on the scene, Hahn isn’t glitzy. With a broad pallet of sound mixtures, an unfazable technique and utter sincerity and honesty as a musician, she avoids received interpretations and cliched gestures. That makes her all but unique among her peers.
Her take on the concerto was thorough and deep. She soared on the romance of the opening movement then, with equal persuasiveness, zipped through the black-magic and pixie-dust Scherzo. Hilary Hahn is developing into a most remarkable artist.
The concert was conducted by Roberto Abbado, an Italian and a regular ASO guest who doesn’t hold a music directorship anywhere — this raises many questions — and who is still best identified as the nephew of Claudio Abbado, ex-chief of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Abbado kept the ASO properly quiet through the concerto, all the better to let the musicians sing out when they had the tune.
The evening started strong, too, with an Americana classic, although surprisingly the ASO had never before performed it.
“Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day” is the 15-minute final movement of Charles Ives’ “Holiday Symphony.” It’s a raucous celebration of old-time small-town life, of marching bands and church hymns and charmingly corn-pone attitudes.
As the granddaddy of American vernacular art music, Ives crams it all in. The resulting beauty (or cacophony) comes almost as a side effect. In one sweet passage, tubular bells tinkle as a flutey Protestant hymn is carried on the breeze. Moments later, the ensemble is crashing into itself. The din is deafening, and gleeful.
Unusual that the ASO, under the Ives-loving Robert Shaw, never played the full “Holiday Symphony.” Unusual, too, that Abbado led the finale but didn’t opt to include the (optional) part for chorus, which sings a bit near the end.
The ASO swam through the music, breathing the idiom like a catfish breathes in the mud. Overall, it was a magnificent, refreshing reading.
Symphony Hall’s acoustic is disinclined to sonically flatter the orchestra. Yet in two colorful symphonic sketches — Debussy’s “La Mer” and Ravel’s “Bolero” — Abbado managed to draw almost a full spectrum.
In “La Mer,” the ASO played with transparent clarity and a dose of brilliance, from the gravely soulful low harp notes just after the start to the silvery radiance of the noonday sun over the sea.
There’s another way to imagine Debussy — not through clarity and clean lines but through a sensual smudging, trying for a hazier, Impressionistic sound. The latter approach is a lot harder to accomplish.
Ravel’s “Bolero” is one long crescendo with a steady pulse and a catchy tune. The trick is to keep the expansion under control, building smoothly. As “head music” fit for intoxicated listening, it predates the Minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich by about 60 years. Taken apart, each would reveal similar compositional attitudes: simplicity of means can yield a viscerally powerful experience.
And it’s “Bolero” that probably attracted a large and motivated audience Thursday. Too bad this work, of the evening’s four, was the sloppiest and sounded the least rehearsed. The brass playing was uncharacteristically floozy and there was little sense of ensemble cohesion.
Indeed, the orchestra got carelessly loud and peaked too early. But a noisy and overcooked “Bolero?” The audience loved it.
Happily, the playing of everyone on stage should be better calibrated for subsequent shows — capping an all-round excellent program.
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