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ASO teaching the classics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org.
School was in session Thursday in Symphony Hall, for better and worse.
At the end of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s concert, we were treated to Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” a dazzling instrument-by-instrument tour through the mighty ensemble. A pair of enthusiastic, poised student narrators — Jennifer Picard and Patrick Russum, both musicians in the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra — delivered the play by play. The ASO delivered passion and high spirits, the best showing of the night.
At the beginning, however, in music by Mozart, we received a different sort of instruction: a fraught etiquette lesson.
It was subtle but effective. Conductor Donald Runnicles was leading Mozart’s Symphony No. 29. The opening movement, agreeably zesty and tuneful, had come to a close. A few folks in the audience started to applaud, which is verboten nowadays but follows the practice of Mozart’s own time. Were these clappers neophytes to the concert hall? Were they scholar-activists on a mission to restore so-called “historically informed” audience practices? It was hard to tell.
Whoever they were, Runnicles shut them down with a raised left hand, a signal that he wasn’t finished. With silence restored, the symphony could continue.
Classical music and its practitioners are clearly in a period of upheaval. The music itself, on good nights, remains vital. But our culture is zooming away from the social conditions and lifestyle under which orchestras flourished. Attention-deficit American audiences are more fickle than ever.
Yet the musicians on stage cling to their familiar and, frankly, staid conventions of dress, repertoire, scheduling and, most peculiarly, enforced audience etiquette. They play; we sit there in worshipful silence and applaud at the designated time.
Does it have to be this way? Why stifle the audience?(Wagner’s “Parsifal” profits from a hyper-receptive, and thus stone silent, listening; Mozart would surely laugh at the argument that applause wrecks mental concentration.) One suspects that a little more musician-audience give-and-take would be a welcome advance.
Mozart’s Concerto in F for Three Pianos, just before intermission, featured Runnicles as conductor-pianist, joined by two relative youngsters, both from Atlanta: Robert Henry, a prize-winning pianist and doctoral candidate in Maryland, and Sarah Elizabeth Gibson, a talented pianist-composer studying in Indiana.
Although the reading seemed at times underrehearsed — with Runnicles’ hands busy on the black and whites, the orchestra gave ragged accompaniment — it was neat to see the three keyboards facing the audience in a long row and to watch the communication among pianists. In the slow middle movement, they elevated the concerto from elementary exercise to poignant statement.
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