SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Varèse, Herbert, and Rachmaninoff: Michael Stern, cond., Lynn Harrell, cello, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 8.2.2008 (BJ)


Rachmaninoff, though Varèse’s senior by only ten years, might be thought to occupy an utterly distant region of the musical universe from that inhabited by his fellow adoptive American. Yet, when the Rachmaninoff work in question is the Third Symphony, the distance is not unbridgeable, and offering that piece on the same program with Varèse’s Intégrales made stimulating sense.

Michael Stern’s interpretation, moreover, helped to create some point of contact between the Russian-born romantic and the French-born modernist. Intégrales, which opened the evening in an edition revised by the composer’s devoted pupil Chou Wen-Chung, is certainly not a work to coddle the ear. Its orchestral sonorities, dispensing with strings, are searingly incisive and often violent in dynamic level. But without smoothing away any of the music’s essential dissonant aggression, the conductor allowed its moments of relative serenity to emerge in full sonic bloom, so that the total effect was more humanly approachable and sympathetic than I have found in previous hearings of the work.

The Third Symphony is prime late Rachmaninoff. It shares the Symphonic Dances, which was his last and probably greatest work, a new fining-down of sonority and texture that stands in strong contrast with the sheer sumptuousness of such works as the Second Symphony and the Second Piano Concerto. It profited accordingly from Stern’s brisk yet never forced pacing, and from the lean, clean tone he drew from the Seattle Symphony’s admirable strings, especially in the violins’ frequent stratospheric sallies. Concertmaster Maria Larionoff shaped her solos elegantly. With principal oboe Ben Hausmann here, as in the Varèse, in equally fine form, and the rest of the orchestra similarly on its individual and collective toes, the result was an analytical clarity of sound that laid the symphony’s unconventional structure aptly and satisfyingly bare, while keeping Rachmaninoff’s unquenchable expressiveness in unfailing focus.

The evening’s centerpiece was provided by another, slightly earlier American transplant: Victor Herbert, who was born in Dublin in 1859 and is remembered more for his sparkling operettas than for his serious orchestral music. He was, however, a reputedly superb cellist, and the second of the concertos he wrote for his own instrument was the work that provoked DvoÍák, when he heard the premiere in Carnegie Hall, to embark on his own masterpiece in the genre. Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto may not be quite on DvoÍák’s level, but it is a charming, exuberant, and brilliantly scored piece, and it found a passionately committed and eloquent soloist in Lynn Harrell, who recorded it some two decades ago and obviously loves it. His tone has lost nothing of its richness, warmth, and clarity in the intervening time, and he showed himself more than equal to the music’s virtuoso demands, one or two little quirks of intonation notwithstanding. Stern and the orchestra entered enthusiastically into the spirit of the thing, and a good time was had by all, both on and in front of the stage.

Bernard Jacobson

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