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ASO plays Tan Dun and Mahler
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Program repeats Friday and Saturday. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
At the breathless, racing climax of Tan Dun’s Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — an instant before the Symphony Hall audience gave a cheering, standing ovation — soloist Thomas Sherwood plunged a colander into a big bowl of water and lifted it high. Arms outstretched, he produced a rainstorm in miniature.
It was a spectacular flourish to cap a uniquely enchanting piece. It was also the most blatantly theatrical image in a 20-minute work that blurred perceptions of concertos, theater, space and even music itself. Anyone who finds pleasure in the simple sound of giving a baby a bath, or washing a dog in a tub, will be taken by the intrinsic beauty of this concerto.
A little background. The New York Philharmonic offered Chinese-born, New York-based composer Tan a commission for its principal percussionist. (Tan, born in 1957, is best known for his soundtrack to the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”)The sound and symbolism of water, an unlikely substance on the concert stage, intrigued the composer.
Premiered in 1999, the score calls for various gongs, bottles, glasses, plastic tubes, wooden bowls and hands to be dunked, sloshed, gurgled, struck with sticks and made to produce sounds — all while immersed in water. (Microphones helped broadcast the splish-splash noises through the hall.)
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Sherwood, its principal percussionist, gave the local premiere of Tan’s concerto Thursday. It was a blast to hear and watch.
They began with the house lights low. Sherwood entered from the back of the hall. He and two fellow percussionists, positioned on either side of the stage, creaked a rusty-hinge cacophony — an ominous introduction. Soon the large water bowls became the primary focus, where Sherwood thrust his hand into the fluid, over and again till the ker-plunks and drips became an intricate rhythm. To this the orchestra took mostly an accompanying role, with passages evoking marching soldiers and perhaps ticking clocks and an ancient, mystical Asiatic past.
What’s so disarming about Tan’s concerto — aside from its likable spirit, at once modernist and populist — is its in-your-face innocence. Splashing water is the most primal of sounds, and thus one of the most soothing and unsettling if we listen closely. We’re nurtured by water, and we can drown in it. Tan forces us to remember what most people purposely forget as insignificant. And it was a winning performance for Sherwood, an ASO member since 1999, who here made his solo debut.
After stagehands mopped up during intermission, conductor Robert Spano and the orchestra performed Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” (“The Song of the Earth”), a symphonic setting of quasi-Chinese poems with two vocal soloists. There’s water in this music, too, depicted in the tinkles of the allegretto.
Approaching his own death, the composer here put a lifetime of regrets, fears and introspection into music, and in performance it often feels like his most profound work. What Beethoven’s Ninth is for the triumphant and communal, “Das Lied” is for the resigned and personal.
The orchestra responded with moments of immensely fine playing, including firm French horns and trumpets, Jonathan Dlouhy’s plaintive oboe solo in the second movement and Christopher Rex’s droning cello lines, almost a one-note Greek chorus.
The vocal soloists, too, brought much to the evening. Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey sang with a fresh, Siegfried-style voice, both heroic and boyish, a rare combination that proved quite right for the “Of Youth” movement.
Nancy Maultsby is a mezzo-soprano with a lot of personality and a thick, distinctive, ever-present vibrato. She sang “Of Beauty” with tender heart. But by “Farewell,” the longest and last movement, she seemed emotionally spent, and some of the most poignant, heartbreaking lines passed without special attention. This is a program that I suspect will come together better in subsequent performances.
Spano’s command was total and his interpretation substantive, satisfying and thoughtful without holding any emotional revelations. I don’t think Spano is after that sort of Old-Europe response to this symphony. His take was relatively bright and maybe even youthful. He seemed eager to grasp the music’s wisdom, not revel in its sorrow.
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By Tom Rector
March 11, 2005 11:44 AM | Link to this
Wonderful! ASO should address MORE modern and WOrld influenced music (as I understand they will in the next season). Keep up the good work!