SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Other Links

Editorial Board

Google Site Search

Schumann, Hovhaness and Bartók: Maki Namekawa (piano), Seattle Symphony, Dennis Russell Davies, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 16.4.2009 (BJ)

Schumann: Symphony No.4 in D minor, op.120
Alan Hovhaness: Lousadzak (“The Coming of Light”). op.48 (1944)
Bartók: Suite: The Miraculous Mandarin


In terms of reputation, Dennis Russell Davies is probably associated for many music-lovers first of all with composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, though one of my own most treasured memories of his conducting is of a powerfully impressive Beethoven Ninth he gave with the Philadelphia Orchestra when he was artistic director of that orchestra’s summer season at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center back in the 1980s. The concert now under review, the first of two subscription programs he is leading in Seattle this month, afforded the opportunity to hear him at work in three styles of music: one work came from the 19th-century Austro-German symphonic tradition, the second was related in a tangential way to the minimalism that Davies has enthusiastically espoused, and the third might be called a mainstream 20th-century classic.

Schumann’s Fourth Symphony opened the evening, and I was very much taken with Davies’s conception of the work, even if that conception was not quite matched in the execution. There was considerable grandeur and nobility in the conductor’s breadth of view, emphasizing the heroic, and indeed majesty, of the music more strikingly than its ground-breaking contraction of sonata-form procedures. Concertmaster Maria Larionoff’s solo in the second-movement Romanze was seductively played, and Davies managed the transition from the finale’s slow introduction into the main body of the movement with excellent control of tempo and phrasing. Overall, however, there was a certain lack of forward impetus in the quicker sections of the symphony, and the orchestral texture was rather more opaque than may fairly be blamed on the safety-first scoring of Schumann’s 1851 revision.

“Opaque” is just about the last word one could apply to Alan Hovhaness’ Lousadzak (“The Coming of Light”). Written in 1944 when the composer was 33, and carrying the opus number 48, this concerto for piano and string orchestra thus comes early in Hovhaness’ extraordinarily voluminous output. Though not minimalistic in the authentic manner of Riley, Reich, Glass, or Adams, this is one of the sparest Hovhaness scores I have encountered in terms of texture, devoted as it is almost unrelievedly to single-line unison writing throughout. The result is beguiling at times, but I found the piece somewhat lacking in the magic and mysticism that make the composer’s more luxuriant works so attractive. Nevertheless, the solo part was stunningly played by the young Japanese pianist Maki Namekawa. Davies and the orchestra partnered her with evident sympathy and punctuality, and she responded to a warm ovation with an encore in the shape of Paganini Jazz, the Turkish pianist Fazil Say’s take on the inevitable 24th Caprice, which she dispatched with breathtaking virtuosity.

So far as the orchestra was concerned, it was in the final work on the program that virtuosity reached its apogee. I cannot recall ever hearing a performance of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin suite that realized the composer’s vision with such phenomenal vividness of rhythm, articulation, and color. I only wish I could share Davies’s obvious love of the piece, but to my mind this is one of the most repellent works ever penned by a great composer. Of Bartók’s three stage works, both the one-act opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and the ballet The Wooden Prince seem to me infinitely more musically rewarding and humanly sympathetic.

I have to acknowledge that what I don’t like about Mandarin stems precisely from the composer’s success in translating a story of the ultimate sleaziness into music – but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Even the bits that are supposed to be seductive, primarily the clarinet solos that represent the prostitute’s attempts at luring her marks, though played with consummate artistry by Christopher Sereque, strike me as just about as erotic as watching the dancing at a third-rate Bavarian beer hall. Still and all, Davies’s ability to bring out every detail of the brilliant orchestration in dazzling relief and full force yet without a trace of coarseness, and the surpassingly beautiful playing of the strings when Bartók gave them the occasional chance, made for a spectacular conclusion to a stimulating evening. 

Bernard Jacobson


^{Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page}