A distinct lack of delirium
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/alsop
The protean nature of Leonard Bernstein’s genius has shone especially brightly at the Proms this week. On Saturday, we had the innocent high jinks of his musical On
the Town; on Monday, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and its longserving music director, Marin Alsop, brought us his Second Symphony, The
Age of Anxiety. This shows Bernstein the anxious seeker after religious certainties in a time of doubt. The symphony follows four lonely New Yorkers in their search for meaning, as portrayed in WH Auden’s poem of the same name.
In fact, the distance between the two wasn’t always so great. In the symphony’s penultimate movement, the four troubled souls try to drown their anxieties in some frantic partying, represented in a hectic jazz-style movement with a fearsomely virtuoso piano part (the symphony is actually a piano concerto in all but name). Soloist Jean-yves Thibaudet was more than adequate to the music’s difficulties – in fact, he made it seem too easy; the essential element of desperate delirium was missing. He was more convincing in the moments of lonely nocturnal pensiveness earlier in the piece, and in the cadenza managed to be both epic and intimate at once. Marin Alsop, an ex-student of Bernstein’s, knows the piece as well as anyone alive, and paced the journey from anxiety to cautious radiance at the end with canny exactness.
So far so good, but after the interval came another response to The Age of Anxiety that lacked Bernstein’s self-conscious cleverness but, in depth of feeling, left him far behind: Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. Alsop brought the same virtues to this that she had brought to Bernstein’s piece – alertness to telling detail, rhythmic flexibility, and an eye to the music’s overall trajectory. This ensured that the performance had its eloquent moments, particularly in the Allegretto, where Shostakovich’s orchestration took on an unusual seductive glow.
But in the end what counts in a performance of this piece is the degree to which it plumbs the music’s tragic depths, and by that measure this one seemed lacking. The stony beginning seemed like Shostakovich-lite, altogether too clean and clear, and the terrifying beginning of the Finale was too cautiously measured. One could see the strategic purpose of this – it gave Alsop more room to build to a heroic conclusion. But there are moments when a performer needs to throw strategic caution to the winds, and this was surely one of them.
Broadcast on BBC Four on Friday at 7.30pm. Hear this Prom for 30 days via the BBC Proms website. The Proms continues until Sept 8; 020 7070 4441. Hear them all live on BBC Radio 3