Beethoven, McKinley, and Stravinsky: Asher Fisch, cond. and piano, Chee-Yun, violin, Alisa Weilerstein, cello, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 15.3.2007 (BJ)

Last season’s Rosenkavalier at the Seattle Opera established Asher Fisch in my mind as a conductor of considerable talent. His gifts were evident again in the second half of this program, which coupled two 20th-century works: William Thomas McKinley’s Concerto for Orchestra No. 2 and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements.

The juxtaposition was perhaps unfair to McKinley, whose five-movement work was composed in 1993 and dedicated to the Seattle Symphony’s music director, Gerard Schwarz. Far the best music in it was to be heard in the second movement, which the program listed in inaccurate Italian as Ballad: Largo é lamento. I have to take issue with the annotator’s suggestion that this movement “has the character of a Mahler adagio”–it is totally innocent of the irony, the quasi-Brechtian distancing, that lies just beneath the surface of Mahler’s music–but it is an expertly scored and plangently expressive piece, and it made a powerful effect. Despite orchestral playing of whiplash intensity, however, the quicker movements conveyed a feverish quest for animation rather than the real thing, and the stertorous rhythms and flinty sonorities that dominated all three of them left little scope for inter-movement contrast. In consequence, I was left feeling after the concerto’s third movement that it might just as well have ended right there, though I will concede that the fourth movement, a limping Valse Triste, did add some character of its own.

What emerged from the crisp and dramatic performance of the Symphony in Three Movements that followed was the far more incisive and compelling musical character that Stravinsky was able to extract from a less feverish aim for effect. It might, by the way, have been helpful to the audience if the program note had shared the composer’s revelation, in his published conversations with Robert Craft, that the first movement was inspired by a documentary film “of scorched-earth tactics in China,” and that the finale was partly “a musical reaction to the newsreels and documentaries that [he] had seen of goose-stepping soldiers,” and then to “the rise of the Allies” after the overturning of the German war-machine.

It was just as well that the second-half performances were so good, for Beethoven, before intermission, had fared very much less well. The curtain-raiser, the Egmont Overture, began badly. Fisch failed to distinguish clearly between the lengths of the two big tutti unisons that Beethoven carefully differentiated by placing a fermata over the first but not the second. In the following Allegro, moreover, a similar absence of rigorous detail was evident in the inconsistency of the lengths of phrase-ending notes.

These flaws, though, were as nothing compared with the near-chaotic mess into which Beethoven’s Triple Concerto was allowed to degenerate. In sharp contrast to the previous week, when Christian Zacharias had directed Mozart from the keyboard with clear authority, Fisch’s attempt to double as piano soloist and conductor came sadly adrift. His own playing, perhaps in consequence of over-pedaling, lacked the crystalline clarity inherent in Beethoven’s piano part. It may have been because of this that the violin and cello parts, at any but the most lightly-scored moments, emerged as so much ineffectual scrubbing. The soft and lyrical passages were handled better, especially by violinist Chee-Yun, but Alisa Weilerstein’s cello tone failed for the most part to sing, and her failure to control the dynamics of her line frequently resulted in phrases where the less important linking notes were louder than the main melodic ones.

And it was not only when the conductor was occupied at the keyboard, but even when he stood up to give more specific direction, that orchestral ensemble was pervasively approximate, everyone seemingly hanging on for dear life in the hope of reaching the end together. A sense of risk is often a welcome means to exciting and truly musical playing, but this was altogether too much of a good thing. Listeners unfamiliar with the concerto could be forgiven for concluding that it is a badly and incoherently composed work, rather than the profoundly original masterpiece revealed by any remotely adequate performance.

Bernard Jacobson