Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of "Mockingbird" returns to the KC

Maeve Moynihan and Richard Thomas in To Kill a Mockingbird
at the Kennedy Center. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Harper Lee published one novel in the first half-century of her career, To Kill a Mockingbird. Most Americans read the book in middle school, but the most popular movie adaptation, starring Gregory Peck, likely has the upper hand in people's memory. Aaron Sorkin adapted the play for Broadway in 2018, where it had enormous success, leading to a national touring production that came to the Kennedy Center Opera House last year, a venue critiqued as too large for it. The staging has returned to the arts center on the Potomac, with most of the same cast members, but this time in the much more appropriately scaled Eisenhower Theater, seen on Thursday evening.

The movie version shifted the story's focus from young Scout Finch, Lee's alter-ego, to Atticus Finch, played by Peck, as a sort of white savior figure in his legal defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman in Alabama. Sorkin followed the movie's lead, putting a few monologues of eloquent progressive pieties into the mouths of Atticus, Scout, and other characters, West Wing-style. The play's alterations to the role of Atticus were so profound that a legal battle with the Lee estate ensued. Following in the footsteps of Jeff Daniels and other actors, television actor Richard Thomas gave Atticus a lachrymose, supercilious quality that did not always seem the most fitting. On the other hand, this Atticus at least acknowledged his own shortcomings and racist assumptions. Lee's father, on whom the character was based, was related to Robert E. Lee, after all.

Other Reviews: Peter Marks, A resonant ‘Mockingbird’ recalls American racism then — and now (Washington Post, June 23, 2022)

Sorkin intentionally emphasized the two black roles, Tom Robinson (a dignified Yaegel T. Welch) and the Finches' maid and cook, Calpurnia (played by Jacqueline Williams with caustic wit that almost stole the show), giving them more of a voice. This is undercut in some ways by having the Ewells, Joey Collins's cartoonish Bob and Mariah Lee's fragile Mayella, become caricatures. The truest portrayal of a southerner, equal parts polish and hate, was the vicious Mrs. Dubose of Mary Badham. Few are likely to recognize her as the same 10-year-old actress who played young Scout across from Gregory Peck in the movie. It was a stretch to cast adults in the three child roles, but Maeve Moynihan (Scout), Justin Mark (Gem), and especially Steven Lee Johnson's Dill used physical elements to appear more awkward and young. In his vocal and physical choices, Johnson seemed to point up the idea that Lee based the character of Dill on her real-life childhood friendship with Truman Capote.

Sorkin's main conceit, that the three children narrate the action, which shifts back and forth between the trial and other scenes, made theatrical sense. The repeated breaking of the fourth wall wearied before the evening was over, especially when Thomas's Atticus directed some of his final summation from the trial pointedly at the audience rather than the jury box (drawing attention, perhaps, to the reason why there were no jurors seated in it). The change to the final scene, where the now-dead Tom Robinson appears and points a line in a Bible out to Atticus, remains in the production.

The elephant in the room for this play is Harper Lee's second book, Go Set a Watchman, published rightly or wrongly in 2015, a few years before the play was adapted. It is Lee's first draft of the book that became Mockingbird, and in it the 26-year-old version of Scout returns from New York to her home town in Alabama to visit Atticus. She is disappointed to realize that Atticus is not the saint he seems in Mockingbird, that he is trying to slow down racial progress in the county, even working against the NAACP. Lee's first take on the material makes Atticus a more human, fallible character than how he is often interpreted. He is a more realistic version of a white man living in the Jim Crow south, rather than the version encouraged by Lee's northern editor, when as Lee herself put it, she was young and did as she was told.

To Kill a Mockingbird runs through August 27. kennedy-center.org

Briefly Noted: A Trio of 20th-century Piano Trios

Montsalvatge / Tailleferre / Korngold, Piano Trios, Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio (released on August 4, 2023) Centaur CRC4037 | 57'11"

Audrey Andrist has been a long-time fixture at Washington-area concerts, particularly in contemporary repertoire. The Canadian-born pianist plays often with her husband, violinist James Stern, as a duo and, with National Symphony Orchestra cellist Steven Honigberg, as the anchor of a rather fine piano trio.

While beautifully played, the new disc from the Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio, released by Centaur Records, is of interest primarily because of its intriguing combination of music. First is the Piano Trio by Xavier Montsalvatge, dating from the 1980s, when the Catalan composer was in his 70s. This suave, refined work, infused with jazz and folk elements, feels like a love letter to Spain. Its first movement is a "Balada a Dulcinea," infused with tender sweetness for Don Quixote's imagined sweetheart, followed by a "Diálogo con Mompou," referring to another composer, Montsalvatge's contemporary from Barcelona.

Adding to the recent rediscovery of Germaine Tailleferre's piano music is her Piano Trio, composed during World War I, when it went unnoticed and unpublished. The French composer took the piece up again in 1978, when she was in her 80s, and the revised version is a mixture of early and late styles, as she wrote a new second movement and added a fourth-movement finale. With each of the four movements clocking in at a balanced three minutes each, the piece has a pleasing unity.

Erich Korngold composed the final Piano Trio on this disc, the longest of the three works, when he was only twelve years old. The piece was among the fruit of his tutelage with Zemlinsky, study recommended by Gustav Mahler, who had heard a cantata the boy had written. A child prodigy, Korngold had already had a ballet score performed professionally in Vienna, and Artur Schnabel was performing his piano sonata around Europe. This trio is a tour de force for the pianist, and Andrist rises to the occasion, especially in the rollicking Scherzo, an hommage to the Viennese waltz redolent of both Strauss and Mahler.

Mahler, who was born today: Two Record Reviews from the Archives

Mahler. Sometimes it's just a bit too much. But a post today is appropriate though, because today, 163 years ago, Mahler was born. Mahler recycled his ideas (and sometimes those of others) - and so will I, adapting a post (part of which ended up here) that was published on WETA's website on this day, 13 years ago, in order to rescure two short record reviews that would otherwise have been lost to the æther:

Mahler, Symphony No.1 Honeck / Pittsburgh SO Exton SACD

Because we don’t have enough Mahler to satisfy our every taste and desires, Manfred Honeck has also started a cycle “if it is possible, in the next five, six years” with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. If the audiophile Exton label doesn’t get its distribution act together, it may not matter, since we can’t get a hold of the recordings… but if we do (and I’ve snagged a copy of the First, released in April; the Fourth will be out next, and the Third was recorded in June), we might find it’s much more than another layer of Mahler-overkill.Über-idiomatic and rambunctious, joyously self-celebratory, laugh-out-loud daring, hyper-romantic but without the (differently-appealing) heavy hand of Bernstein, it is one of the most notable Firsts to have appeared in a very long time. Perhaps that can be partly blamed on the old zither teacher of Honeck.

When Honeck was a kid, he was—very reluctantly, because it was deemed cruelly uncool even then—made to learn the zither. He had an old teacher; not technically gifted but of a generation that had the Austrian folk music and rhythms in their blood and able to pass it on. Recording Mahler now, Honeck said that now he knows why he has reason to be thankful for those lessons: because he took to Mahler’s Ländler-rhythms like fish to water. “That’s something you can’t learn”, he suggests, “but rather absorb and hope to be able to pass on. In any case, that’s what I’ve tried with these recordings and so far I am very happy with the result.” The fact that he plays the unique rhythms and snaps up wherever they appear, contributes a good deal to the zest and color of this recording.

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Mahler, Symphony No.9 Norrington / Stuttgart WRSO Hänssler

Yet another Mahler cycle [Ed.: Correction: just a recording; no cycle planned as of yet] from Roger Norrington who finds himself delighting in a happily controversial golden fall of his career. With the ideology and methods of the original instrument and historical performance practice movement, he’s been inching his repertory ever further up, suggesting that the modern tradition of performing romantic music is in fact much more modern than the music itself and that in just a few decades the newfound habits—especially that of permanent orchestral vibrato—have clogged out memory of how the composers themselves still had (and expected) their music (to be) played. When he forces this theory down an unwilling or unable orchestra’s collective throat—regardless of the merits of his theories—the results have been frankly awful. I shudder to remember the Bruckner Fourth he made the NSO perform a few years back. But he has his own modern orchestra lab now—the excellent SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, and they have wisely learned to go along with Norrington’s shtick. Not just hesitatingly, by the sound of it, but with considerable enthusiasm and even more dexterity. The results are performances of staple repertoire played in ways you haven’t likely heard before (Norrington goes further, with more teeth, than Herreweghe) which has in turn put the Stuttgarters squarely on the map of record collectors and concert-goers—both as object of derision, but more and more so of admiration.

Norrington calls the vibrato-free playing of his strings the ‘pure tone’ and suggests that the last time we’ve heard an orchestra play with such a pure tone was the pre-World War II Vienna Philharmonic, still led by concertmaster Arnold Rosé (Mahler’s friend and brother in law), and conducted in such a ‘pure’ Mahler 9th by Bruno Walter’s famous EMI recording (which I happen to think is woefully overrated). So Norrington gives the great diffuser and comfort-smudger that permanent vibrato admittedly is, the boot, and has his modern instrument violinists, violists, cellists, and double basses hit the notes and play them clean without—literally—the wiggle room that vibrato provides, intonation-wise. Since his orchestra knows how to do that now, the sound isn’t off; instead it’s more direct, seeming a little more strident at first, a little sharper, but certainly also more detailed and clearer. Or, I suppose, ‘purer’.

I’ve only now heard the Ninth Symphony of Mahler with Norrington (aFirst, Second, Fourth, and Fifth are also available), and while I wouldn’t say that loving this performance means being sold on his theory to the exclusion of the various other current ways of performing Mahler, I, well… I love it. There is a zany bite and yet a plain simplicity to the music that is very refreshing, gripping, and exciting. Although Norrington certainly doesn’t stretch the heavenly closing Adagio to its limits at 19’24’’ (that’s two minutes faster than Boulez), he draws out the ethereal quality just right. He also manages to keep the tension in those last minutes when the energy of the symphony drops to what can end up a hesitant whimper rather than carefully stringed repose evaporating into a confident, gentle goodbye.


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City Ballet, Modern and Contemporary

Joseph Gordon and Unity Phelan performed in Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, New York City Ballet. Photo: Paul Kolnik

New York City Ballet returns to the Kennedy Center Opera House this week for its expected early summer visit. For the first of two programs, seen on Tuesday night, the company has revisited four short ballets by its celebrated founding choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. A second program features the work of more recent choreographers leading the way into a new era.

A theme emerged over the course of the evening, perhaps intended but perhaps not: reflections in a mirror. In two striking Balanchine works based on Baroque music, Square Dance and Concerto Barocco, ensemble and soloists are balanced, often dancing in symmetrical patterns. Balanchine attempted a cross between American folk dance and classical ballet in Square Dance, from 1957, even using a square dance caller originally, an innovation he wisely removed later. The music, concerto grosso movements by Vivaldi and dance pieces by Corelli, often features twinned melodic lines, which Balanchine interpreted visually in movement, with fine solo work here from Megan Fairchild and Joseph Gordon. The final movement, a spirited Giga by Corelli, even had something like the feel of square dance music.

This later ballet, although seen first, hearkened back to Concerto Barocco, from 1941, redone for NYCB in 1948. The music, Bach's Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, was even more explicitly about image and reflection in its twinned lines. Two groups of four women mirrored one another, echoed by two lead soloists, the graceful Isabella LaFreniere and Mira Nadon. In the gorgeous slow movement, a male soloist intruded, the long-armed Russell Janzen, upsetting the perfect symmetry of this world of female friendship and balance. Played without scenery and in stark lighting, designed by Mark Stanley, it was likely the first ballet Balanchine had danced in practice clothes rather than costumes, which became a signature of his updated style. The dancers welcomed violinists Oleg Rylatko and Ko Sugiyama to the stage for a well-deserved curtain call.

Tiler Peck performed in Balanchine's Donizetti Variations, New York City Ballet. Photo: Paul Kolnik

The evening's most striking work was the only choreography by Jerome Robbins on the program, the gorgeous and erotic Afternoon of a Faun, from 1953. Claude Debussy's rapturous score received a marvelous performance from the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, conducted for the evening by Andrews Sills, down to the exotic touches of crotales and harps. Robbins devised a meta-updating of the infamous earlier choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky: the faun and nymphs here become a male and female dancer who meet in a ballet studio, indicated by the barre running around its edge.

The oneiric quality of the scene, suggested by the fact that Joseph Gordon is seen asleep on the floor and returns to sleep at the end, implied that the stunning Unity Phelan was a figment of the man's imagination. He (and she, to a degree) spend most of the time staring at the audience as if seeing their reflections in a mirror, even in their most intimate moments. This vain self-regard - two beautiful people watching themselves in the mirror - was sexually charged and, of course, an acknowledgment that this is what dancers spend some of their rehearsal time doing. The awkward kiss Gordon planted on Phelan's cheek, to which she pressed her hand as if it burned, the shock seeming to propel her out of the room, now brought to mind, at least to me, the charges of sexual abuse by female dancers against former NYCB artistic director Peter Martins. At the same time, the effortless surprise lift of Phelan by Gordon, as Debussy's music swept upwards, was strikingly beautiful.

After these three more serious works, it was good to end the evening with some low comedy in Balanchine's Donizetti Variations, a 1960 romp set to ballet music from Donizetti's French grand opera Dom Sébastien, Roi de Portugal. It's a ballet that is as silly as it is fun, and the pairing of the sassy veteran Tiler Peck with the vivacious Roman Mejia, a rising star, lifted the end of this meaty program with effervescence. The whimsical moment when a corps dancer thinks that a trumpet solo is her cue for an ill-advised leap into the spotlight garnered hearty laughter, and don't leave the theater before you hear the incredible solo turn by the orchestra's glockenspiel player.

Alexei Ratmansky's updated Pictures at an Exhibition, New York City Ballet. Photo: Erin Baiano

The highlight of the B program, featuring City Ballet's new crop of choreographers, was Alexei Ratmansky's surprising, varied Pictures at an Exhibition, last seen at the Kennedy Center in 2015. The piece remains light-hearted yet powerful, with an ensemble of ten dancers moving through the space of an art museum to the strains of Musorgsky's "Promenade" movements (original piano version played somewhat tentatively by Susan Walters). The dancers form smaller solos and ensembles for the intervening movements, representing artworks, their colorful costumes mimicking the bright circles of Kandinsky paintings projected on the screen at the rear of the stage. Ratmansky, who has publicly and strenuously criticized his native Russia's war in Ukraine, has made a significant addition to the final tableau of this ballet, the movement known as "The Great Gate of Kyiv": a large image of the Ukrainian flag, in the style of a Mark Rothko painting.

Justin Peck's first solo ballet, Solo, featured the lovely Naomi Corti making her debut in the role. String players from the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, under the direction of Tara Simoncic, gave an ardent rendition of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, often seeming only tangentially related to Corti's movements. The two most recent works disappointed by their length and repetition: Standard Deviation, choreographed by Alysa Pires to the pulsating, blues-saturated music of Australian composer Jack Frerer, and the robotic Love Letter (on shuffle), choreographed by Kyle Abraham and set to a (long, ear-piercing) prerecorded track by James Blake. Both pieces have some eye-catching moments, with long stretches in between.

New York City Ballet presents both programs in alternation through June 11. kennedy-center.org

Scottish Ballet's Gothic 'Crucible' lands at the Kennedy Center

Scottish Ballet's production of Helen Pickett's The Crucible. Photo: Andy Ross

Helen Pickett created her choreographed adaptation of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible for the Edinburgh Festival in 2019. The troupe that premiered it, the Scottish Ballet, is finally touring it in the United States. (The work's planned premiere at the Kennedy Center, in May 2020, was canceled for obvious reasons.) After its run at the Kennedy Center, which opened on Wednesday, the production will go to the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. The play's setting, the Salem Witch Trials, and the subtext of its premiere, the Red Scare led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, are both eras of American history we should not be wanting to repeat but may be doomed to do. Pickett's grim and grimy version, with its techno- and electronica-infused score by Peter Salem, seemed more timely than ever at the second performance, Thursday night, in the Eisenhower Theater.

Pickett's adaptation both telescopes the action of the play and fleshes out some of the characters by examining their motives. Act I opens with Abigail, the orphan girl whom the Proctor family has hired as a servant, dreaming of a happy family life. Elizabeth Proctor, burdened with a baby and perhaps suffering from post-partum depression, learns that her husband, John Proctor, has had an affair with the girl. Discovered dancing naked together in the forest, Abigail and a group of local girls accuse Tituba, an enslaved woman, of leading them into witchcraft. A council of churchmen, determined to root out the devil in their midst, solicit more accusations from the girls, leading to the eventual downfall of the Proctors.

Other Articles: Kyra Laubacher, Scottish Ballet Tours Helen Pickett’s The Crucible to the U.S., Bringing Miller’s Tale to Its Home Soil (Pointe, May 15) Elliot Lanes, Interview: Theatre Life with Peter Salem (Broadway World, May 25)

The Crucible is a mixture of theater and ballet, which deprives itself of the greatest strengths of both art forms. The accusing shrieks of the girls and even talking by some characters shatters the idea of a story told exclusively by movement, but the use of ballet like periodic arias partially undermines the potential realism of theater. The set pieces, designed by Emma Kingsbury and David Finn, float and tilt into different shapes, with occasional hanging pieces of fabric, all creating the sense of a drab industrial environment.

The most effective use of dance was in the church scenes, where unified movement became a metaphor for the group-think of religious conformity: the gray-swathed congregants moving in lockstep and imitating faithfully the movements of their pastors. The Men of God, whom the work's creators reportedly thought of "as a menacing flock of birds," leapt and spun with bravado and more than the occasional hint of Merce Cunningham's Preacher in Appalachian Spring. The duet between Kayla-Maree Tarantolo's needy Abigail and Bruno Micchiardi's conflicted John Proctor is striking for its overt sexuality, balanced by the latter's tender scenes with Bethany Kingsley-Garner's Elizabeth Proctor.

Salem's score is austere, with a bass-heavy string ensemble (two violins, one on a part, against three violas, three cellos, and two basses) providing drones and keening melodies, conducted by Daniel Parkinson. The instruments in the pit are all miked, and Salem has added reverb for atmospheric effect at times. In addition to live oboe, flute, bassoon, and trombone, two keyboards and electronic sample pads mix in other sounds. The score leaned most to the electronic side in the forest scene, with over-amplified thudding rhythm giving the nude dancing scene the air of a night club. Salem's next collaboration with Pickett is reportedly a new ballet based on Flaubert's Madame Bovary, planned for this November at the National Ballet of Canada.

The Crucible runs through May 28. kennedy-center.org

Ionarts-at-Large: Muscular Lyricism. A Stupendous Budapest Festival Orchestra Visit to Vienna

A week after Riccardo Chailly had been in town with the Filarmonica della Scala – a curiously disappointing affair, it was time to listen to Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, this time over at the Musikverein, in a triple-B program.

Bach’s Fourth Orchestral Suite, individual glitches aside, was a gorgeous rendering that reminded, how badly missed Bach is in such orchestral concerts, ever since the composer has been left to the HIP-specialists, except for the high holidays when the choral works get wheeled out. And in fact, it was the BFO’s own early-music wing that entered onto the stage of the Golden Hall, outfitted with a set of age-appropriate instruments. Stately yet driven, this set the auspicious tone.

Harpsichord went, Steinway came, and with it András Schiff for the lyrical Third Piano Concerto. From the first note, the noble power, stately restraint, and again the brimming forward momentum, stood out. Schiff’s matter-of-factly lyricism was coupled with a sweet, forceful touch and the orchestra was full of verve and color.

It seemed hard for Brahms’ Third to better this. But the tight, propelling way Fischer had with it, leaving no chance for rhythmic confusion in that tricky first movement, just about did that. It’s rare to hear an orchestra play with such purpose, concentration, and beauty of tone – and on this evening, all those elements were in place, in spades. But then, this almost shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Or maybe any orchestra from Budapest, for that matter.


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Muskulöse Lyrik

Das Budapest Festival Orchestra mit einer Sternstunde.

...Brahms‘ Dritte Symphonie musste da schon zum Ereignis werden, um mithalten zu können. Wurde sie: Dominant, musikalische Rufzeichen, treibende Bässe und gezügelte Kraft. Energie wurde hier zu Masse, nicht Geschwindigkeit. Alles spielte mit gleicher, fast ungehöriger Intensität, gerne laut, aber ebenso konsequent in leiseren, lyrischen Momenten. Zu guter Letzt transformierte sich das Orchester noch zum Chor für die Zugabe von Brahms‘ "Liebe Schwalbe, kleine Schwalbe". Fünf Sternchen? Fünf Herzchen! [weiterlesen]

Photo: © Sonja Werner

Kennedy Center revives clownish "Spamalot"

Cast of Spamalot in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. Photo: Jeremy Daniel
Monty Python nerds and opera fans, rejoice: this month the Kennedy Center has righted the backwards state of things at the arts venue on the Potomac. The city's leading presenter is mounting an opera in its Opera House and a musical in the Eisenhower Theater, the way things are supposed to be. Your choices are devastating tragedy, in a fine production of Puccini's La Bohème, or inane comedy with a hilarious revival of Eric Idle and John Du Prez's 2005 Broadway hit, Spamalot, seen on Sunday evening. Or one can have both, as it should be.

The best musicals of recent years have tested the boundaries of vulgarity and inappropriate humor: Avenue Q, The Book of Mormon, and Matilda come to mind. Likewise, the Pythons have been grandfathered into the present age with their politically incorrect wit intact. Most of the scenes we all quote from Monty Python and the Holy Grail are transformed into stage action, often in ways that are transparently low-tech, which only makes them funnier: the killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, the Black Knight ("It's only a flesh wound"), the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, the cow-catapulting French soldiers who spout absurd insults. Other jokes, like the troll's three questions ending on a stumper about the air velocity of an unladen swallow, are worked into the show in other ways. For good measure, other great Python musical numbers, including "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" from Monty Python's Life of Brian and the fish-slapping scene from The Flying Circus, also make an appearance.

Other Reviews: Peter Marks, ‘Spamalot’ might be retro, but it’s still a riot (Washington Post, May 15)

Josh Rhodes directs this zany Broadway Center Stage production, which features not a weak link in its very strong ensemble cast, including many faces Broadway fans will recognize. James Monroe Iglehart makes an amusingly clueless King Arthur, who gathers together the Knights of the Round Table from the misfits he meets in his travels, assisted by the true-hearted Matthew Saldivar as his sidekick, Patsy. Alex Brightman's vain Sir Lancelot, in a 21st-century twist, learns something about himself thanks to his rescue of Rob McClure's fey Prince Herbert, the young man who only wants to sing and not marry the woman with the large tracts of land coveted by his father.
Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer. Photo: Jeremy Daniel
Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer camps it up as the Lady of the Lake, with a classic Liza Minnelli send-up in the Vegas as Camelot scene and an acidic parody of a Broadway prima donna in "Whatever Happened to My Part" in the second act. Michael Urie's cowardly Sir Robin gets the best number in the show, "You Won't Succeed on Broadway," which prompts King Arthur to search for that quintessential element for the success of any musical, Jews. In the list of the Chosen People projected on the screen (Barbra Streisand, Steven Spielberg...) is the name of a certain "Jew-ish" freshman congressman from New York. John Bell conducts members of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, seated out of view on a high platform at the back of the stage. The amplification makes them sound like pre-recorded tracks at times, but they really are live.

Spamalot runs through May 21. kennedy-center.org

Ionarts-at-Large: Riccardo Chailly, Filarmonica della Scala, and Mao Fujita at the Konzertaus (@ Wiener Zeitung)

The expectations for the concert of the Filarmonica della Scala were high, what with Riccardo Chailly bringing Stravinsky's rather recently re-discovered Chant funèbre, op.5, to the Konzerthaus: the work he has given such a tantalizing premiere-recording with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. (Review on Forbes). To boot, the whole thing was embedded in a program of Russian gorgeousness: Rachmaninov's Third and Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony.

Mao Fujita, second-place winner at the last Tchaikovsky Competition, was the soloist – and he, too, has left a very fine recent memory on record, with his young, neatly considered cycle of Mozart Sonatas. His performance, replete with some curious rythmic accentuations, was met by roaring applause and localized Bravos – and perhaps for the sheer athleticism of that work and not being sidetracked during a minute-long rogue hearing-aid vaguely going along with the music, auto-tune-like, they deserved it. But the orchestra sounded muffled, with strange balances and instruments popping out of the mix unexpectedly. The short, tart little trumpet accents that blurted like an 1970s Fiat honking in brief anger, were a solitary delight amid a strange, massive, energized listlessness. Chailly seemed to do all the right things but the sound wanted to tell another story.

That was the problem with the Chant funèbre, too, where there was little left of that Wagner-goes-Tchaikovsky-reaches-Dukas magic, that his recording suggests. The strings seemed wooden, the cellos were scarcely audible, and while the double basses did their best, even they couldn’t push the greater apparatus into gear. The Prokofiev Seventh (with the coda-finale) – too nice a symphony to be taken seriously – was a little better in most regards, including balance, but still a brooding lump of sound. The Glockenspiel whinged and a lusty tuba brought smiles to faces. The two “3-Orange” encores, loud and fun, began to show some vigor – but still didn’t suggest that one had just heard a great orchestra on even a decent day.


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Robuste Romantik

Die Filarmonica della Scala gastierte im Konzerthaus..

Nach der Wiederauffindung des "Chant funèbre" war es Riccardo Chailly, der das atmosphärisch funkelnde Strawinsky-Frühwerk beeindruckend ersteingespielt hat. Zusammen mit der Filarmonica della Scala im Wiener Konzerthaus brachte er nun mittels eines kraftvoll warmen, jedoch nicht sonderlich differenzierten Klangteppichs immerhin etwas von dieser von Wagner zu Tschaikowski bis Paul Dukas reichenden Magie über die Bühne... [weiterlesen]

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