Honegger:
Pastorale d"été
Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major,
K. 271
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben
In some
quarters it may well have been considered
foolhardy, rather than merely heroic, for
a Swiss orchestra not widely credited with
front-rank status to bring Richard Strauss’s
Hero’s Life to Philadelphia in the
course of its 2004 US tour. In Philadelphia,
after all, Wolfgang Sawallisch very recently
served for a decade as the resident orchestra’s
music director; and in the eyes of many local
music lovers, encouraged by the unwavering
encomiums of the city’s press, Sawallisch
enjoys the reputation of World’s Top Strauss
Conductor.
Well,
I have no wish to question the German maestro’s
dedication to Strauss’s music, which indeed
he has championed in a manner both determined
and at times highly convincing. But in my
judgment Zürich’s Tonhalle Orchestra,
under the baton of the American conductor
now in his ninth season as its music director,
gave us on this occasion a realization of
Heldenleben superior to anything I
have heard from Sawallisch in this or related
repertoire.
I am
not suggesting that the Tonhalle is, player
for player, a better orchestra than the Philadelphia,
or even perhaps its equal, though the Swiss
ensemble played throughout this concert with
a quite wonderful zest and polish. The tone
of the strings, underpinned by a double-bass
group of exceptional strength and clarity,
is not a fat sound, which would hardly match
David Zinman’s interpretative tastes. But
it is lustrous and refined in the extreme,
and all the other sections of the orchestra,
from piquant upper woodwinds to adroit percussions
and massively assured trombones and tubas,
contributed to a consistently cultivated whole,
enhanced by some superb horn solos–in Honegger’s
charming curtain-raiser as well as in the
Strauss–and impeccable work from concertmaster
Primoz Novsak in Heldenleben’s extended
depiction of the latter composer’s mercurial
wife.
More
important, however, than the technical qualities
of the orchestra was the sweep and grandeur
of Zinman’s musical conception. My problem
with Sawallisch’s Strauss has always been
what I experience as a want of amplitude,
of sheer luxuriance, not so much in the sound
as in the phrasing. For example, in Also
sprach Zarathustra, which Sawallisch performed
with the Philadelphia Orchestra just a month
earlier, despite all the merits of interpretation
and execution, I found an unwillingness to
let this supremely spacious music really expand–there
was, as too often happens when he conducts
Strauss, a sense that musical points are being
made just a fraction too quickly, that things
are happening too soon. By contrast, it was
Zinman’s unhurried pacing, his ability, without
any detriment to the forward impulse of the
work as a whole, to draw out every phrase
to its full breadth in the manner of classic
bel canto–think, as a parallel, of
Kreisler in the slow movement of Beethoven’s
Violin Concerto–that I found most thrilling
in this characteristically insightful reading.
It was the perfect blend of exuberance with
repose.
An equally
graceful and stylish collaboration in Mozart’s
Ninth Piano Concerto with Leif Ove Andsnes–a
pianist whose gifts are rivaled by hardly
any of his contemporaries–added to the pleasures
of the afternoon. Perhaps it is regrettable
for Americans that Zinman, now 67, seems to
have decided that directing an orchestra in
his native country is not an activity that
he can reconcile with his stimulating penchant
for musical and what might be called musico-social
exploration; he left his most recent American
post, in Baltimore, a few years ago. But he
has evidently found a congenial orchestral
home in Zürich, where he is pioneering
such activities as a series titled "Tonhalle
Late"–concerts starting at 10 p.m., followed
by drinks and dancing till 4 in the morning,
that pack the
hall with what, in a recent interview, he
called "a fantastic audience" in
the 17 to 25 age-bracket. So I suppose we
should not begrudge his very special talents
to a city that clearly appreciates them, but
content ourselves with welcoming him as a
frequent visitor who brings something refreshingly
individual back to America’s more convention-bound
orchestral life.
Bernard Jacobson
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