OSM VISITS NEW YORK
Carnegie crowd won over
Just like old times, it was: Ravel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Bizet and some Beethoven to break things up.
And there was that familiar scarlet “sold out” ribbon plastered across the OSM poster on 57th St. while people both sought and sold tickets on the sidewalk.
Outside the stage door after the concert, musicians were raving about the celebrated Carnegie Hall acoustics and feeling good about a job well done. All quite in keeping with tradition.
Perhaps the most relevant throwback was the affectionate interplay with the audience: plenty of bravos, two encores, multiple curtain calls and a prevailing sense that these New Yorkers ( many of them subscribers to the International Orchestras series, in which the OSM appearance on Tuesday was packaged with concerts by the likes of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic) felt they had got their money’s worth.
“Merci beaucoup,” Kent Nagano shouted from the stage, by way of reminding his fellow Americans of the cosmopolitan identity of the orchestra he has led since 2006.
This was substantially a crowd of music lovers who wanted to be there, notwithstanding a substantial contingent of McGill alumni ( to whom principal bassoon and professor Stéphane Lévesque spoke at a gathering before the concert), a class from a United Nations school ( ditto principal bass trombone Pierre Beaudry) and the usual team of officials, sponsors and dignitaries.
“A little bit extra special” were the paradoxical words Lévesque chose to describe the experience of playing the opening solo of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in this temple ( which he did with evocative melancholy).
Concertmaster Andrew Wan was a regular visitor to this hallowed place during his years as a student at the Juilliard School. His perspective: “I feel so proud and humbled to be here with my colleagues, carrying on this tradition.”
Wan contributed a lithe violin solo to the first encore, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which to my ears received the most magical and certifiably OSM- ish performance of the evening. Flutist Tim Hutchins was his seductive self and harpist Jennifer Swartz worked marvels of subtle articulation.
The program started with Ravel’s La Valse, another OSM standard. Nagano opted for inner detail where Charles Dutoit, last month in the Maison symphonique, was more concerned with dramatic sweep.
Maria João Pires, as in Montreal, played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in an extrovert style that suited the first- movement cadenza and finale best.
The sight of this petite Portuguese septuagenarian is not easily reconciled with the decisive sounds she extracts from a Steinway.
The OSM accompaniment was likewise big- boned. No period practice stuff here. Amply cheered, Pires gave Beethoven’s anti- virtuoso Bagatelle Op. 126 No. 5 as a solo encore.
Stravinsky was heard after intermission in a performance that sounded as ferocious at the end of Part 1 as it did mysterious at the start of Part 2. “He has a funny way of conducting that,” observed the New Yorker seated beside me. “His hands are going everywhere.”
The result was an open texture and an improvisatory style. I could have done without the swaggering Farandole from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suite No. 2 after that Debussy, but the crowd was not complaining.
Carnegie is not the only setting with cachet on this 10- concert
tour. Boston Symphony Hall ( Wednesday) and Orchestra Hall in Chicago ( Friday) have illustrious histories of their own ( not to mention great resident orchestras with which the Canadian visitors will be ruthlessly compared).
The last stop, Zellerbach Hall on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley on March 26, will be a homecoming for Nagano, a former music director of the Berkeley Symphony who maintains a residence in San Francisco.
Timing is tight. Travel to New York from Washington was by bus immediately after the concert. Musicians turned out their lights in the Sheraton on 7th Ave. after 2 a. m.
New York to Boston was also a bus transfer. “Kind of brings me back to my marching- band days,” said principal trombone and Tennessee native James Box of the barnstorming schedule.
Reviews will soon accumulate. The welcome in the Washington Post for the opener in the Kennedy Center was not exactly warm. Anne Midgette devoted most of her attention to the freewheeling young Russian virtuoso Daniil Trifonov in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, behind whom
Nagano and the OSM merely “lumbered along.”
While she grudgingly acknowledged “moments of freedom and vitality ” in the Rite, the critic also heard “stridency, particularly in the winds” in the concert and “some diffuseness of ensemble playing.”
As for Nagano, he “has a tendency to be a little flat emotionally when not involved in complexity — particularly in his slightly airless reading of Debussy’s Jeux.”
Oh, dear. Not one for the scrapbook.
This was substantially a crowd of music lovers who wanted to be there.