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ASO Ties Itself In Knots and This is a Good Thing
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org, 404-733-5000
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s music director, Robert Spano, is as sharp a concert programmer as any conductor in the business.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, he assembled what on first glance seemed like disparate music by Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin and Cesar Franck. Yet in juxtaposition, and by Spano’s coherent interpretations, they felt tightly locked, each work referring to the others, where the concert as a whole amounted to much more than its parts.
Berlioz and Franck, born a generation apart, were both French-speaking Romantic composers whose affinities were less with the French than with the darker, more philosophical Germanic musical traditions.
Berlioz and Chopin, contemporaries in Paris, violated compositional formalities and pushed their instruments — the piano for Chopin, the whole orchestra for Berlioz — into uncharted worlds. Horn calls within the Franck and Chopin works, and supernatural spirits in the Franck and Berlioz, were small details that took a new potency in this collection.
They opened with Franck’s “The Accursed Huntsman,” which is cinema before the invention of the movie camera.
In 14 minutes, the music is a pictorial, literal setting of a once-popular tale where a German count defies God’s command to rest on the Sabbath and goes hunting. He’s chased by demons, flames flickering at his feet. If you know the story ahead of time, it’s all there, every click of the horse hooves, ever backwards glance to evade hot pursuit.
The ASO’s reading was terrific, starting with the call to the hunt and ringing church bells played by the orchestra’s crack French horn section.
Garrick Ohlsson, a regular guest on this stage, was soloist for Chopin’s F minor Piano Concerto. The American pianist is a formidable Chopin specialist because he doesn’t go looking for stereotypes — of the Romantic martyr, of the genius introvert, of the weepy poet, of the proto-avant gardist.
Virtuoso pianists looking for these characters will finds them, and more. Ohlsson instead takes the notes at face value. In the concerto, the textures were scrubbed clean, the emotions honest, the lyricism pure and youthful — reminding us that the piece was composed by a 19-year-old. What was missing was a sense of mystery. It was perhaps a little too fresh faced and earnest.
Ohlsson returned for an encore: Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 27 no. 2, beautifully judged, rather sunny in disposition, perfectly taped at the end. This is how popular pianists continue to build their audience capital.
The concert ended with five episodes from Berlioz’s “Romeo et Juliette.” Labeled by the composer a “dramatic symphony,” it’s not so much Shakespeare put to music as the tempestuous, serene, melancholy, reactionary and euphoric impressions of Monsieur Berlioz when he read the play. (The program originally included six excerpts, with bass Denis Sedov — the Colline from last week’s ASO “La Boheme” — singing a Friar Laurence aria. But as they say in times of war and orchestral rehearsal, stuff happens. Sedov withdrew for “artistic reasons” and the Berlioz was reconfigured.)
The violas, in recent years the ASO’s weakest section, got the star-crossed tale started with ferocious spunk (and in tune) — which raises the question of why they can’t play with this much intensity on a weekly basis.
Yet on this highly strung program — under Spano’s often tense baton — the orchestra couldn’t maintain its focus throughout the rather dry selections of “Romeo et Juliette.” The energy levels flagged during the “Love Scene” and never recovered — a situation likely to be remedied in subsequent performances.
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By Chopin
October 9, 2007 11:29 AM | Link to this
I attended the concert and thought it was brillantly done. The horns sounded great as the strings were well in tuned. Very well down ASO. Bravo!!!
By Peter Stelling
October 12, 2007 4:54 PM | Link to this
I find it unacceptable that any subscription concerts of the ASO are deemed unworthy of a first night review. No review in print or posted on the internet for Thursday, October 11? What gives?