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Titans and Creatures from the ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Friday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.
It was business as usual for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which can be a very good thing. Friday night in Symphony Hall, conducted by Jun Markl, the theme was Prometheus, the trickster Titan who created the human species, gave us fire and ambition and, as a result, tangled with control-freak Zeus.
Jump ahead a few eons. Zeus is now powerless, degraded to myth status, but humans rule the world. We owe Prometheus quite a debt.
Markl started with the overture to Beethoven’s ballet “The Creatures of Prometheus,” and the ASO responded to their conductor with glee. Tight and focused in performance, with rock-steady tempos, the music here seemed to be perpetually accelerating, with the excitement factor pushing the maximum — a perfect concert opener, lavishly presented.
Later in the program came Liszt’s 1855 tone poem “Prometheus,” making its belated ASO premiere with these concerts. In trying to depict specific images and ideals, the composer pushed the boundaries of color, energy and vividness: The rolling timpani is thunder, the thick brass fanfare represents the Titans as seen through the clouds of the heavens, and so on.
Liszt wasn’t the first to put literalness in music — Vivaldi and Beethoven did a good job depicting birds in the forest, and Berlioz (in “Symphonie Fantastique”) expertly captures the sound of a severed head bouncing in the basket below the guillotine. But Liszt, for better and worse, standardized the sounds made in the world. And his musical style, as heard in “Prometheus,” was generic enough to be easily copied without penalty. (When Star Wars stormtroopers march to John Williams’ heavy-footed symphonic accompaniment, think of Liszt. Indeed, Williams copies Liszt’s basic musical vocabulary.)
Liszt remains an odd case, his reputation in the halfway house between visionary genius and flaky entertainer. That seems about right.
The concert closed with a rather tired reading of Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathrustra” — a quasi-Promethean tale and the high-water mark of 19th century tone poems for large orchestra. The ASO’s unstoppable zest heard in the Beethoven overture wasn’t around for the Strauss. It sounded routine.
Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, usually programmed at concert’s end, came just before intermission. The soloists who’ve performed this concerto with the ASO are almost a roster of the violin world’s legends of the past 50 years. Nick Jones’ program note lists Issac Stern (1951), Yehudi Menuhin (1958), Henryk Szeryng (1981) and half-dozen others.
Nicholaj Znaider, a Dane of Polish-Israeli background and already something of a star at 31, is the latest. Tall and dashing, in a designer black suit with a red hankie peeking out of his breast pocket, Znaider, by first impression, seems like a supervirtuoso of the old school.
His makes a huge sound, with no gaps, no flaws, no struggle. His approach tended toward the quiet, the meditative and the austere, trying to uncover secrets buried in the score. Yet if, unlike the titans who’ve played with the orchestra before him, his Beethoven interpretation wasn’t especially personal or original, well, that’s a reflection of our times and the standardization we demand from soloists. Znaider plays Beethoven more or less like we heard it the last time, which is the only way we seem to like it.
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