Concert Review
James L. Paulk. 8 p.m. March 13. Additional performances March 15 at 7:30 and March 16 at 2:00. $24-$75. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree Street, Atlanta. 404-733-5000. www.atlantasymphony.org.
Thursday’s Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert was the season debut for principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles, and we got a delightfully eccentric program that featured three transformative pieces, with ASO music director Robert Spano joining Runnicles for a “hands on” handoff featuring rarely performed four-hands piano versions of two of the works prior to the orchestral versions.
Runnicles is better known as an opera conductor than for his concert music, and years spent working in Germany have given him a special affinity for Wagner (he is currently music director of the Deutsch Oper Berlin). Atlanta doesn’t get to hear nearly enough of this side of him, but this concert opened with the orchestral version of the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” As he said in introducing the excerpt, “Tristan” is a “remarkable, transfixing” opera that was a huge turning point for music. Sadly, it has not been staged in Atlanta in well over half a century, so little morsels like this are all the more treasured here.
This was a dynamite performance. Hearing the piece without a soloist and with the orchestra onstage rather than in a pit gives the listener a chance to hear nuances in the orchestral score that would slip by in the opera house. Runnicles was clearly in his element, and this was an energetic, passionate reading. It was also a master class in orchestral textures.
The two conductors played Ravel’s “La valse” in a highly virtuosic transcription written by the composer, dense and full of colors. The artists were having fun, and it was contagious. Runnicles then returned to conduct the orchestra in the same work, and the difference was striking. For one thing, it was much easier to discern the structure of the work in the piano version. But the orchestral version was performed with more subtlety.
In 1981, when living in New York, I found my way to Alice Tully Hall for a concert featuring the irrepressible Leonard Bernstein. The highlight of the evening was the four-hands piano version of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” for which Bernstein was joined by Michael Tilson Thomas. It was a raw performance, with wild energy substituting for perfection (you can hear a recording of this very performance free, via the miracle of YouTube). Thursday’s concert ended with a sort of reenactment of this parlor trick, and I wish I could say the same for our conductors. But here we only got excerpts, and they seemed gentler, slower, not as crazy. On the other hand, it’s a ballet and if they’d danced it you wouldn’t necessarily judge them by the same standard you’d use for Vaslav Nijinsky, who choreographed it. So they get a bit of slack.
Speaking of Bernstein … when Stravinsky heard him conduct “Rite of Spring,” his reaction was: “wow!” At our concert, Spano returned to conduct the orchestral version, but without the “wow.” It was, in a sense, impeccable. But “Rite” needs to be raucous, almost out of control, and this was just too civilized.
The concert opened with “Nimrod” from Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” in an eloquent, stately tribute to ASO bassist Doug Sommer, who died a couple of weeks ago.
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