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Gershwin and Beethoven:  Peter Donohoe, piano, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Andreas Delfs, cond.,Seattle, 13.11.2008 (BJ)


Standing in for the second week of André Previn’s canceled residency with the Seattle Symphony, Andreas Delfs made a far more favorable impression than the previous week’s replacement conductor, John Fiore. He also offered an unchanged program, though not venturing to play the solo part in Gershwin’s Piano Concerto as Previn had been scheduled to do.

Now in his twelfth season as music director of the Milwaukee Symphony, the 49-year-old German-born Delfs successfully evoked both the lyricism and the orchestral brashness of the Gershwin concerto, for which the gifted English pianist Peter Donohoe was drafted in as soloist. Donohoe played with massive assurance and vividly focused tone, while Delfs seemed more at ease with the characteristically American rhythms of the music than a Russian conductor I heard flounder his way through the work a few years ago.

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was the other half of this rather short program. Delfs, incidentally, made it even shorter with tempos in the scherzo and finale more hectic than even Beethoven’s characteristically fast metronome markings, and also by omitting both of the exposition repeats Beethoven asked for in the first and last movements.

Despite that, there was much to admire in the performance he drew from an orchestra happily restored to something like its best after the previous week’s sloppily directed concert. The first impression was a tad worrying, for the conductor made nothing of the distinction between “loud” and “very loud” in the initial two statements of the introduction’s theme, and a rather jerky stick technique naturally elicited somewhat spasmodic orchestral phrasing and excessively clipped staccatos.

After that, however, things went much better. The strings (with Emmanuelle Boisvert again the excellent guest concertmaster) were back on song, articulating crisply, and making some particularly airy and lovely sounds in the quieter sections of the score. Rhythms were lively, textures clear, and climaxes came most effectively when they needed to, with the horns in their high register dominating the ensemble just as they should.

This was not a Beethoven Seventh to rival the revelatory performance the young Dutch conductor Lawrence Renes conducted in Seattle back in 2006. Delfs’s overruling of Beethoven in the matter of repeats, moreover, is a solecism in these enlightened days, and damaged the structural integrity of the symphony. (Renes rightly observed both repeats.) But at least the music was for the most part beautifully played, and drew an ovation of appropriate warmth.

Bernard Jacobson

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