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ASO’s season-closing concert
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.
To close its 60th season, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Robert Spano returned to the deepest core repertoire, attracting a sold-out audience to Symphony Hall on Thursday. The entire weekend of concerts is virtually booked solid, likely because of the names on the program: Beethoven and Berlioz.
In his notes for the program booklet, Nick Jones lists past ASO performances of each work. Over the years, soloists for Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto — played 12 times in 60 seasons — have included Rudolf Firkusny (1956), Glenn Gould (1962) and Emanuel Ax (1994).
The soloist in 1976, and again Thursday, was Garrick Ohlsson. A large, brawny fellow, Ohlsson makes it tough to separate images of his physical presence from his work at the piano — he makes the Steinway look relatively diminutive.
He played beautifully, immaculately, in the opening Allegro, and in a passage that marches up and down the keyboard, he drew the sort of huge sound you would expect to hear. But those heavy clomps evaporate, a moment later, into a pearly fog that hovers over the keys — under his feathery finger we heard shades of his great teacher at Juilliard, Rosina Lhevinne.
In the concerto, Spano and Ohlsson shared a mind-set. Their conception was fundamentally romantic, with heightened personality and bravura passions, but also “classical” in the Mozartean sense, where proportion, logic and control framed the music making.
The achingly tuneful middle movement can seem jejune if played with gushing expression, but here it felt amorous and tender, like a love poem, with orchestra and pianist breathing together.
Throughout the concerto, the ASO players worked wonderfully well as a unit, like chamber musicians. (Oboist Jonathan Dlouhy, notably, sounded anemic and squeeky Thursday, as he has for the past several weeks.)
The last time the ASO performed Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique,” in 2002, conductor Charles Dutoit supercharged the musicians, eliciting their most colorful, exhilarating and even most psychologically nuanced playing ever, or so it seemed at the time.
Spano isn’t that sort of magician with the idiosyncratic music of Berlioz. Yes, he gave the composer’s quirky, asymmetrical phrases their due. But under Spano, the ASO delivered merely a polished reading.
This is clearly a minority opinion, as the hall erupted with “bravo” when it was through, but I felt the bits that make Berlioz really special weren’t there.
The “Symphonie” cheerfully tells a morbid tale of a young man, an elusive girl, unrequited love, murder and drug-induced nightmares. Under Spano’s direction, the waltz tune in “The Ball” movement was bland and didn’t suggest layers of creepy infatuation. In the “March to the Scaffold,” it wasn’t clear to the listener when the guillotine slices the hero’s head off, and it bounces twice into the basket — Spano didn’t time it theatrically so as to be gruesome or comic. An exciting piece, to be sure, but in Spano’s reading it left me underwhelmed.
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By Ronald
May 20, 2005 10:52 AM | Link to this
A perceptive review, Mr. Ruhe, but I think you are wrong about the “value” of Mr. Spano’s Berlioz. I was one of the many, many people who cheered Thursday night. This was the first ASO concert I have attended in over five years, and it was one of the best.
By Stan K.
May 20, 2005 12:33 PM | Link to this
Nice to read your headline “At 60, the ASO goes back to basics”, and nice to read it was to a sold-out audience, It reminds me of the movie, the Field of Dreams. Do you remember the statement “If you build it, they will come.” Well, as I have been preaching ever since Maestro Spano took over, “If you play it, they will come.” And I meant the true classics rather than the new and innovative classical music that he has been introducing to ASO audiences. And I still feel Donald Runnicles is the more suited to be the Conductor of the ASO than Maestro Spano is.
ASO audiences since I arrived here in 1975 will turn out to hear the masters works, they always have and when you try to foist new, innovative and experimental works on them, you get a turn-out of some 600 to 700 attendees as they did several weeks ago. The Grand Classics are always going to be the Grand Classics, they have always appealed to audiences over the past few hundred years.
Anyway I thought your critique was well balanced with kudos to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto, sadly played only 12 times in 60 seasons and criticism of the way the maestro’s reading of Berlioz’s “Symphonic Fantastique.” was rendered. I couldn’t agree more, even though it did draw several “bravos” from the audience. .