Ravel, Szymanowski, and Musorgsky: Gerard Schwarz, cond., Akiko Suwanai, violin, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 19.4.2007 (BJ)

 

My first reaction, when David Gordon’s fluent trumpet led off the opening Promenade in Pictures at a decidedly leisurely pace, was to think, “Well, this particular promenader seems to be tired even before his walk around the gallery.” After the performance, however, I took another look at the score and there, plain as a pikestaff at the top of the first page, was the instruction, “senza allegrezza”–“without lightness.”

In between, I had enjoyed a performance of considerable virtuosity and not a little grandeur, which also gave full scope to the wittier, more playful panels in Musorgsky’s picture-show. One of the most impressive components in Gerard Schwarz’s reading of the work was the wide and expertly nuanced dynamic range he elicited from it. Gnomus, Catacombae, and The Hut on Hen’s Legs were at times genuinely frightening in their sheer impact; the alternation of self-satisfied imperiousness and cringing servility in Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle was neatly dramatized; and the coming-and-going ox-cart in Byd»o evoked Ravel’s scene-painting vividly. I say “Ravel’s” rather than “Musorgsky’s” because in the piano original this movement begins loudly before receding into the distance. (Another change in the Ravel is the omission of the Promenade after Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle–and this surely ought to have been mentioned in the program-note, especially considering that the work was attibuted on the program page simply to Musorgsky, with no mention of the orchestrator.)

Ravel had begun the evening in his own right, with Ma Mère l’oye. Here, interestingly, Schwarz conducted without baton, and in so doing showed how even fairly large orchestral forces can be handled to charmingly intimate effect. The performance, as deftly paced as it was sensitively colored, was followed by Karol Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto.

After Chopin, the most important composers Poland produced through most of the 19th century were Moniuszko, Wieniawski, and Paderewski. Moniuszko was a figure of national rather than international importance, and Wieniawski and Paderewski, though they wrote much charming music, were more strikingly gifted as performers than as composers. Thus, by the time a “Young Poland” group constituted itself in 1906 around Fitelberg, Kar»owicz, and Szymanowski (1882-1937), something of a creative vacuum had developed, and the group’s agenda centered on filling that vacuum and on forcing Polish music to catch up with the last hundred years of Western European developments. Possibly if there had been less of a vacuum Szymanowki would have become a less conspicuous figure, for, to my ears at least, there is a certain lack of structural cohesion in his music. His own stylistic explorations, reflecting the insecure foundations he had to build on, ranged through late romanticism and neo-classicism to an eventual identification with his Polish folk-music routes, and took in a vivid interest in both the exotic and the erotic on the way.

With such multifarious origins, works like the Second Violin Concerto, in which color and atmosphere are the paramount elements, depend in especially high degree on virtuoso performers to make their effect. On this occasion, the concerto was fully provided for. The orchestra played brilliantly, and supplied a sumptuous backdrop for the young Japanese soloist, Akiko Suwanai. A violinist who commands a tone of gorgeous warmth, she clearly understood the style and message of Szymanowski’s piece, and projected them with artistry, passion, and consummate technical control. I look forward to hearing her one day in music of more concentrated intellectual content, though her way with an encore, the Largo from  Bach’s unaccompanied Sonata No. 3, suggested that at this stage in her career romantic expression is her particular strong point.

 

Bernard Jacobson