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ASO Season Opening Higdon, Beethoven and More
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats 8 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are sold out; call for availability 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra opened its 62nd season Thursday in a sold-out concert that seemed like a check list of the organization’s strengths and ambitions.
New music by a favored young American composer: check.
Music given a run-through for an upcoming Telarc CD recording session: check.
Big, populist, ceremonial music to pack in the crowds and send everyone home happy: check.
The evening opened and closed with anthems of communal celebration. First, members of the ASO Chorus filed down the aisles of the auditorium to join the orchestra, and the audience, in Walter Damrosch’s beer-hall, omm-pah-pah edition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (Is this really the best we can do? If the ASO doesn’t want to play Stravinsky’s edgy 1940s orchestration, shouldn’t they commission their own?)
Next came Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Shakespeare-inspired “Serenade to Music,” a nice way to open the concert season, in washes of lush, twinking, pastoral sound. ASO music director Robert Spano led the serenade like it was a wintertime daydream of a clement summer evening.
Jennifer Higdon’s “Dooryard Bloom” is a 28-minute setting of Walt Whitman’s most celebrated poem (“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) on the mourning of Lincoln, and it’s her most searching and “deep” work to date. Baritone Nmon Ford, who sang the work with the ASO last February at the annual MLK concert, was again soloist Thurday. (Both the Vaughan Willams and the Higdon will be recorded this weekend.)
A master story-teller, Spano has a knack for crafting three dimentional imagery in the music he conducts. His reading of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony held a lot of defiance, an occassional snarl and possibly anger toward some unmentioned force of darkness — and that was all before we heard a single word of poetry.
His tempos in the moment-of-creation opening movement were swift, at times relentless, ever onward. We knew where he was headed.
He likened the second movement scherzo to a cosmic thunderstorm. Each timpani stroke seemed more like a solar flare than a mere lighting bolt. The slow movement flowed forward, too, a wide, tranquil river — almost a lyrical love song — rather than a serene pool of contemplation.
The finale, when it arrived, showed the ASO a bit scrappy — not yet in top form after a summer away from the concert hall and the rigors of the classical repertoire.
But here, at the start of the “Ode to Joy” movement, Spano finally relaxed. He let it breathe, took in the view before the final assault to the summit. (Spano’s imagery is vivid, although not necessarily telling a single storyline.)
A so-so quartet of vocal soloists — soprano Measha Brueggergosman, mezzo Kelley O’Connor, tenor Thomas Studebaker and baritone Ford — sang well individually but sounded bitter as an ensemble. They never blended in shaping phrases.
And they couldn’t compete with the ASO Chorus in linguisitic savvy or articulation of Schiller’s German “To Joy” ode.
Compete? In Beethoven? Yes, the 200 or so voices in Norman Mackenzie’s world-famous choir blows the competition out of the sea — in polished artistry but, sometimes problematically, also in volume and force of attack. It was evident that with so much music to prepare, and recording sessions coming up, Spano let the chorus do their thing, unchecked. When they let loose words of universal brotherhood, sit back and receive the message.
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