OSM concerts had me on edge of someone else’s seat
I thought back- to- back OSM concerts this weekend would leave me thinking about music. They didn’t. I was thinking about money.
A stopped métro train on Sunday had me arriving as the hall lights dimmed, but my seat was in the middle of the corbeille and there were a dozen people in the way — not young, limber people, and I had doubts about their night vision, so I sat on the side in a row of empty chairs.
When the usher came over, I explained I was trying to be courteous to those who’d successfully arrived on time, and I promised to move at intermission, or if the person whose seat I was in showed up, or wherever she told me to go. There were plenty of empty seats. But she insisted I disturb my assigned row immediately. “There are rules,” she explained. “I could get in trouble.” And then, the real reason: “This seat is more expensive than yours.”
Technically, all the seats are more expensive than a critic’s comp, but somehow this didn’t seem like a useful thing to say, and anyway I was busy being stunned. The implication is the OSM doesn’t care about the experience of its patrons — unless they are in the most expensive seats. It’s not really about sharing in music. It’s not about those goosebumps. It’s about what a ticket costs.
I refused to move and Nagano helpfully interrupted the usher’s work by beginning a terrific performance of the Bacchanal from Saint- Saëns’s opera Samson and Delilah, a summer shower of brimstone detail that ended with un- Nagano- like thrashing of the hall, as it should.
Afterward, the usher came back with a huge friend — would they really have thrown me out for trying to be polite? — but luckily for them the orchestra had to make room for Didem Dermen’s qanun, a plucked string instrument, and I could move to my seat without breaking anybody’s feet.
I hope the next time they will be more human. Who are the rules for, after all?
Sunday’s highlights were the Bacchanal and the veil dance from Strauss’s Salomé, which brought out the OSM’s gifts for rapid turns of mood and violent explosions amid hushed, shimmering lines. Pianist François- Frédéric Guy was a game last- minute replacement in Saint- Saëns’s fifth Piano Concerto, and his performance was full of character, with extra weight on already emphatic piano lines, but I’d rather listen to him play Beethoven — real drama, not dramatic effect.
On both days, Monika Jalili sang arrangements of songs by Jamshied Sharifi with great mobility and gradually opening tone. Kiya Tabassian’s charming Vers où l’oiseau migrera? was premièred with soprano Françoise Atlan’s supple singing ( and rippling lines from Dermen) in its entirety on Sunday and as an excerpt on Saturday. This was weird since it’s only 12 minutes long and, naturally, the complete performance was better.
Saturday’s memorable work was Philip Glass’s riotous and numbing Concerto Fantasy for two timpanists and orchestra. The piece is a beast, and once or twice we seemed to hit some acoustic limit of the hall, but Nagano’s fastidiousness kept it together. And anyway, it’s Glass. If you can’t make out a pattern immediately, there will be 30 more opportunities.
The Concerto moves energetically, but soloists Andrei Malashenko and Hugues Tremblay found spectacular energy for the third movement duet. Their virtuosity got my pulse racing, but the piece felt basically cold, like the musical equivalent of a treadmill stress test.
Glass is a composer “who never had a good idea he didn’t flog to death” in Justin Davidson’s marvellous quip, and though the composer’s influence is huge, this holdout of U. S. manufacturing might — over 50 film scores alone — has output some order of magnitude greater than his originality. But he’s so much fun to program since proximity to his simple repeated structures always creates resonances across disparate works. This happened both days.
Saturday ended with Glass’s unexpectedly tender piano performance of Mad Rush. Written in 1979, it’s a classic piece that reminds you how, at its best, his work has a confounding ability to change how you listen.
The OSM also played Paul Dukas’s one- act ballet, Le Peri, from 1912, in both concerts. On Saturday, it was dance music desperately missing the dancers, but Sunday afternoon somehow evoked the movement instead. I was carried away by nuances I didn’t recognize and I heard even more of the outstanding flute and oboe. The extra performance must have helped, but perhaps my seat mattered, too. On Saturday, I was in a cheaper spot on the parterre.