Once again my wife and I had our dinner while watching the latest live-streamed performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). The title of the program was Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” and Other Tales, but I would have preferred to call the event a “Russian excursion.” Three of the four composers on the program were Russian, each with a different background. In “order of appearance,” they were Dmitri Shostakovich, Igor Stravinsky, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The first composer on the program was John Adams; but he was represented by “Slonimsky’s Earbox,” named after the Russian-American musicologist who may be best known for the throughly engaging book he wrote entitled Lexicon of Musical Invective.
Cellist Wei Yu performing Shostakovich’s concerto (screen shot from yesterday’s live-stream)
The program was led by the Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu, who had a solid command in approaching all four of the composers. The concerto soloist was DSO Principal Cello Wei Yu, performing Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 107, the first of his two cello concertos, composed in the key of E-flat major. The second half of the program began with Stravinsky’s poéme symphonique, “Le chant du rossignol” (song of the nightingale), followed by selections from Tchaikovsky’s full-length ballet Swan Lake. All of these offerings were richly orchestrated; and, as is usually the case with these telecasts, the camera work guided the viewer through the panoply of diverse instrumental sonorities.
The performance was consistently satisfying from start to finish. Lintu knew just how to capture the brash rhetoric of Adams’ overture. I was fortunate enough to see Slonimsky “in action” with his coy but always perceptive rhetoric. I would like to believe that Adams was just as fortunate, because his music definitely aroused my own personal memories of the musicologist.
Nevertheless, the concerto was the high point of the evening; and the soloist’s command of the extended cadenza was nothing less than jaw-dropping. I would have thought that he had enough by the conclusion of his performance, but he returned to given an encore. This was the opening Prelude movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1012 (sixth) solo cello suite (which always seems to remind me of “The Irish Washerwoman”).
“Le chant du rossignol” is based on one of the more poignant fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson. Stravinsky composed a full-length opera based on this tale, and the tone poem is basically a distillation of the opera. The distilled version is as engaging as it is brief, and I am somewhat disappointed that the music does not receive more attention. (The last time I wrote about it was in September of 2016, when Michael Tilson Thomas conducted a performance by the San Francisco Symphony.) The instrumentation shows Stravinsky at his best, and those qualities were excellently captured by last night’s camera work.
Given that my writing career (so to speak) began in my efforts as a ballet critic, I am still more than familiar with the full score of Swan Lake. It is usually abbreviated down to the music for the second of the four acts for concert purposes. However, Lintu assembled a suite of his own that accounted for all of those acts (but not with any regard for the narrative). He began with the prologue for the second act (because that is the most familiar music); but this was followed by the waltz in the first act. While his selections did not provide much of an account of the narrative, where this performance is concerned, there was no need to do so!
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