Symphony Sensation

There are few pleasures in my life that rate higher on my thrill-meter than the handful of nights I spend each year at the Boston Symphony.  This year, thanks to the retirement of one of my husband’s colleagues, we were able to upgrade our seats.  On the center aisle and twenty rows from the stage—just far enough to see the when the contrabassoon shifts into motion— we love our vantage point from these seats, marked as two among dozens of gifts in honor of late-conductor Charles Munch.

This weekend’s concert was the great Shostakovich 5^th Symphony.  It was preceded by Ravel’s lovely Mother Goose Suite and the quirky Stravinsky Concerto for Piano and Winds.  Peter Serkin, as the piano soloist for the Stravinsky, was as technically brilliant as the last time I saw him, when he treated me to my beloved Brahms Piano Concerto #1—one of the last big concertos I ever studied.  I am rarely indifferent to a piano soloist; I just couldn’t help feeling that Serkin’s virtuosity was wasted on the Stravinsky, a piece where the piano rarely has an opportunity to show off the character that I find most beautiful in the instrument.  Clearly the composer felt differently, as he premiered the piece himself with this orchestra; however, I was much more interested in what the English horn had to say than the piano.  As a pianist myself, I just could not imagine working that hard for that piece.

All was forgiven as conductor Stephane Deneve took the podium for the Shostakovich, a symphony which, despite winning approval from the Communist Party, shares much of the joy and optimism—as well as the key—of Beethoven’s 9^th.  Here was the Boston Symphony at its best:  its full complement packing the stage, and its virtuosity on display.  The familiar opening intervals silenced the winter coughs that echoed through the audience before intermission.  The tongue-and-cheek second movement was celebratory and brilliant.  The lengthy Largo movement hijacked the emotions of the house, wringing each of us with its unbearable grief and delivering us, finally, to the last movement.  The initial tempo with which Deneve started this movement, marked “Allegro non troppo,” (I looked twice to make sure) actually frightened me.  The BSO strings, however, came alive with such precision, preserving their unison with the brass, as if to remind us of their pedigree as one of the best orchestras anywhere.  To think that I would harbor any doubts!

The triumphant finale kept pushing its excitement to the limit, each blast of chords raising the volume in the hall a bit farther, the xylophone doubling the strings yet resonating audibly far above them, until the final boom of the tympani reached “eleven”.  I was not the only one to jump to my feet cheering; it was gratifying to notice how many had been similarly perched on the edges of their seats.  I have attended many BSO concerts, but this will remain in my memory for some time to come.

Like all great performances, it evoked images, memories and thoughts of all sorts.  It was hard not to remember my high school’s own symphonic band and its worthy attempt to render it’s stringless version of the last movement.  I was drafted to bring the violins and zylophone to life on the piano, giving me full appreciation of the BSOs grueling tempo.  When we discovered, just three weeks before our performance, that there would be no piano in the hall where we were scheduled to compete, the bandleader handed me a set of mallets and put me to work on the xylophone—just one of many times in my career when I became an ad hoc percussionist.

I also considered, as I let my eyes gaze across the statuary in Symphony Hall, the many generations of musicians and audiences who had graced this historic building.  It is remarkable that we continue to pack this hall to capacity night after night.  Even the seats in the second balcony that face perpendicular to the stage are always filled.  In other cities the orchestras hang by a thread financially; the magnificent Philadelphia Orchestra, for example, a fixture on the musical landscape for generations, is facing bankruptcy today.  In Boston, however, although we failed to save our classical radio stations, our Symphony continues to loom large.  I counted eighty-eight endowed orchestra chairs, sixty-seven of which are endowed in perpetuity. 

Even more remarkable to me was the homey realization that we were spending an enjoyable evening of entertainment without benefit of high tech gadgetry or special effects.  On stage, each musician was making music with his or her own hands or breath, using instruments that were each crafted or forged entirely by hand.  In many cases, those instruments were many generations old, having been passed lovingly and caringly from one musician to another.  Despite the many wires hanging from the rafters, there is no amplification in Symphony Hall—those microphones are recording devices.  We were listening to the purest of music, projected in real-time by the hands and mouths of live musicians, collaborating to fill the receptive ears and hearts of a grateful audience.  This one night stands alone; the performance will belong only to those who bore witness on this day, musicians and audience members each contributing to the electricity in the hall.  The same program presented the night before or the night after is a similar sensation, but it is something different and distinct.

There is a special place in my heart for professionals who bring music to life, conjuring a sonic apparition that is consumed in the moment, then left lingering in the air until its buzz finally dissipates, and then carried away in the sensory nerves of those who beheld it.  It is a commitment to making art like no other. 

Tomorrow's blog:  O' Susannah!