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ASO’s Savage Brilliance in ‘The Rite’
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
Quite by accident, Atlanta’s been treated in recent days to the defining classics from the first and last decades of the 20th century.
Earlier this week, several local groups collaborated on a Steve Reich Festival, highlighted by the New York Minimalist’s “Drumming” (1971) and “Different Trains” (1988) — post-modern music of shimmering beauty, deep logic and cool emotions.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra went to the other end with a mini Igor Stravinsky festival, capped by that howling monster of early modernism, “The Rite of Spring.”
“The Rite,” as a ballet on pagan Russia, famously stirred a riot at its 1913 premiere. Pitched somewhere between harmonious folk tunes and industrial noise, “The Rite” remains the most extreme music in the standard repertoire: violent, clattering, dissonant, both psychologically crushing and viscerally exhilarating. In a great performance, few other works of art can compare.
The ASO’s performance was shy of superb, but delivered fabulously for all the key moments. Music director Robert Spano didn’t reveal too much too soon. He started softly and rather sweetly, giving the players room to breathe and, not incidentally, get in sync with each other. In the introduction, bassoonist Carl Nitchie’s plaintive cries were as anguished and mysterious as any I’ve ever heard in concert.
As the cacophonies piled up and the rhythms came apart and the whole thing got really loud — with percussionist Tom Sherwood whacking the life out of the big bass drum, which was positioned high and in back, like a sacrificial altar — Spano’s concept turned from modesty to savage brilliance. Expect the orchestra to reveal still more facets of the score in subsequent performances.
Spano opened the evening with Stravinsky in retro mode. After the primal screams of “The Rite,” the Russian-born composer reinvented himself as a hipster fit for the 1920s and ’30s.
Named after an estate in Washington D.C., “Dumbarton Oaks” is a baroque-styled concerto grosso, where the 15 instruments on stage take solo turns then return to the sonic fold, not so different from how Duke Ellington’s jazz band performed, or how J.S. Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos are arranged.
Stravinsky’s music is here cosmopolitan and elegant; direct emotional appeals are off limits.
Yet where the “Brandenburgs” are naively joyous to play and hear, “Dumbarton Oaks” is self-conscious to a fault. You get the sense that Stravinsky kept half the story in reserve. With Spano’s taut sense of rhythm, the ASO’s playing danced along.
As often happens when Spano programs a concert, the juxtaposition of the works is as remarkable as the works themselves. Here two virile and masculine Stravinsky works sandwiched Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17, which somehow seemed like one of the composer’s more feminine creations. There’s nothing especially frilly or girlish about the concerto, yet the ASO and pianist Garrick Ohlsson emphasized its perfume, its lightness, its youthful optimism.
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