To Find Your Opinion, Turn to Page Six

In Monday’s blog (“Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On”), I reported on a concert I attended at Tanglewood, conducted by my college friend, Michael Stern.  I thoroughly loved the performance, the soloist, and especially, my first opportunity to see Michael conduct live.  All in all, it was a rare musical treat.  Then I read the review of the concert in the Boston Globe, only to find out how wrong I was.

The reviewer condemned the program outright as “a rather underwhelming collection of standard repertoire.”   I thought the program was nicely balanced.  The opening Barber’s Overture to School of Scandal was a great departure from the clichés I’ve heard at recent concerts:  Beethoven’s Leonore, Brahms' Academic Festival, Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, Rossini’s Thieving Magpie.  These are all wonderful works that bring color and bravura to orchestral performances, but they are quite overplayed.  And the Barber seemed much like a signature piece of Michael’s.  I was therefore interested in following along, to hear what he had to say.

The Barber was an especially nice touch to counterbalance the more well-known Tschaikowsky’s 4^th Symphony.  The Tschaikowsky is a large scale work.  The youth symphony with which I played in my more tender years was fond of programming the last movement of this symphony.  We were never able to reach the true intended tempo of this work; nor were we able to play all four movements in their entirety.  Imagine a kid who comes that close to a piece but never gets the opportunity to hear a great orchestra play it, simply because major symphonies are too good to play “standards.”  Not every concert needs to bend the ear with a work so contemporary that the listener is forced to read along with the program notes to understand it.  Sometimes I enjoy eating at a restaurant where the meal seems like a “Chopped” challenge, piling up unexpected ingredients in a plateload of irony.  Sometimes I enjoy the comfort of a good steak, well prepared and well-seasoned.   This Tschaikowsky is such a steak.

I was also wrong, apparently, to enjoy Joshua Bell’s rendering of Ravel’s Tsigane, a challenging, virtuosic violin showpiece.  The reviewer referred to Bell’s “being on hand” for the Edgar Meyer Concerto, and “whizzing through” the Ravel.  In fact, I found this piece quite poignant and worthy not only of greater mention, but the performance itself worthy of praise.  The harmonic section alone—where the fingers move in differently-intervalled pairs up and down a string—was, in itself, a master class.  Furthermore, when you attend a concert at an open-air venue such as Tanglewood, the elements of the night air are as much as part of the performance as the musicians.  ‘Tsigane’ means gypsy, and gypsy music is a late-night, outdoor idiom.  The piece opens with an extended, unaccompanied solo rhapsody that made my skin tingle; it was a perfect marriage of artist, Stradivarius, and night air.  Bell’s performance was elevated by the venue itself, making it one of those chilling “Tanglewood moments,” like the time I saw Aaron Copland conduct his “Fanfare for the Common Man” on the same stage.

The reviewer also found nothing to recommend in the world premiere of Edgar Meyer’s Concerto for Violin and Double Bass, calling it “extremely thin” and “a waste of the BSO.”  I attended the world premiere of Meyer’s Concerto for Cello and Double Bass, with Yo-Yo Ma and also at Tanglewood, about ten or so years ago.  In that piece, Meyer toyed with the blending of the two bass-pitched instruments.  In this newer piece, he experimented with the range achieved when combining violin and bass—both members of the same string family but able to reach different extremes of high and low.  Meyer’s juxtaposition of the lowest bass note with the highest possible violin sound, followed by the two instruments’ tumbling melodically toward each other, was sheer whimsy.  I am always struck by Meyer’s compositions, coming as they do from the perspective of a bassist.  Looking at musical possibilities through the eyes (and ears) of this instrument provides a unique vantage point for composition.

I was wrong as well to enjoy Michael’s direction of the Tschaikowsky.  He showed me thematic connections between the movements I had missed at earlier performances.  He also revealed a conversation between the strings and the brass that I had never recognized before.  Yet the reviewer felt the conductor “rarely built with the long-distance phrasing, dynamic subtlety, and sharp rhythmic profile.”  Were we at the same concert?  

Everyone is entitled to their opinion.  I wonder, sometimes, whether critics pan good concerts just to maintain their "street cred."  Or whether the snobbery that once pervaded the inner cultural circles still lives on.  Perhaps Michael, revered in the Midwest as the conductor and resurrector of the Kansas City Symphony, is guilty only of being from a “lesser city” and a “lesser orchestra.”  But I am not the only one who hailed Michael’s debut with the BSO.  When I went backstage after the concert to congratulate my old friend on his great performance, Yo-Yo Ma—another college friend—was there as well, clucking like a proud mother hen.  “Wasn’t he amazing?” Yo-Yo asked me.  

Yes.  Yes he was.

Tomorrow's blog:  Life's Little Irony