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Friday, October 28, 2005
Roberto Abbado conducts the ASO
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.
It is too early in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s season for a retrospective, but in six weeks this fall the orchestra has already delivered six exceptional, often revelatory programs. The ASO is getting better fast. You feel the buzz of acceleration at the concerts.
The latest came Thursday evening. It was a busy night. As the Atlanta Symphony Chorus was singing Mozart’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall — exploring a life away from its parent orchestra — I was at home in Atlanta Symphony Hall, where Roberto Abbado conducted the tormented stars of Soviet music, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Elegant and efficient, Abbado is a regular ASO guest and he communicates with the orchestra on a deep level. Subtle gestures from the Italian can yield a tremendous group response from the players. It happened throughout Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, a large-canvas epic about one man’s journey, written in 1953, soon after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died. It is likely the composer’s most durably powerful, personal and profound symphony.
The opening movement is moody and Mahlerian, and at the anguished climax Abbado had a heavy weight pressing down on your chest, preventing you from breathing.
The conductor slashed through the second movement Scherzo — what might be a musical portrait of Stalin himself — at lightening speed, militaristic, savage, chilling to behold. I’ve never heard this depiction more grotesque, more brutal or more effectively rendered.
The Soviet Union’s other Olympian composer, Prokofiev, filled the program’s top half. His Overture on Hebrew Themes, new to the ASO’s repertoire, is a wonderfully slight work, rich in atmosphere and old Russian-Jewish melodies, always heard with a hint of vulnerability. The orchestra played its best — disciplined, assertive and with a bit of sensuousness.
Only the popular Piano Concerto No. 3, music of machine-age modernism, failed to meet the evening’s lofty standards. Pianist Jon Kimura Parker had the millions of notes under his fingers, but he didn’t seem to have a point of view to share.
I’m reminded of essayist Michael Steinberg’s reaction to Prokofiev’s own recording of this concerto, where the composer-pianist sparks and sizzles, now savage, now gleeful, all at top speed. Next to Prokofiev, he wrote, other pianists sound lazy. (The recording, made in London in the 1930s, features conductor Piero Coppola and is available on Naxos 8.110670.)
In other words, getting the right notes is only a starting point to an insightful interpretation. That’s basic.
Abbado drew a generous helping of lyricism from the score, and thus the concerto’s most enthralling moments came when the orchestra had the big tune and Parker noodled away in accompaniment. The program repeats tonight and Saturday, and as often happens, many of the details should be manicured and in place.
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