The text for yesterday evening’s latest YouTube livestream of the performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) began as follows: “Stories of tragic love unfold through the expressive power of the orchestra.” Each half of the program began with music by Richard Wagner: the Prelude and Liebestod episodes (the latter performed without vocalist) from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde and the “Siegfried Idyll” tone poem, which serves as a supplement to the operatic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung). The first half of the program concluded with another tone poem, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Francesca da Rimini;” and the program concluded with an instrumental suite of excerpts from Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier. Music Director Jader Bignamini led the ensemble.
What struck me most positively was the conductor’s measure-by-measure sensitivity to Wagner’s dynamics. Those familiar with the composer know how his sensitivity to dynamics underscores the narrative subtleties that provide the backbone of the music. Those dynamics are better appreciated when the narrative is performed in its entirety, but there are always subtleties underlying many (if not most) of Wagner’s excerpts. One could appreciate those subtleties in watching Bignamini at work, even when the music has been deprived of its overall narrative context.
The music of the other two composers on the program was anything but subtle. The narrative behind Tchaikovsky’s tone poem was inspired by one of the “Inferno” episodes in the first of the three parts of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. I must confess that the account of forbidden love borders on soap opera, and Tchaikovsky’s music just adds more soap to the narrative. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the composer’s approaches to instrumentation, particularly when he deploys a trio of three separate flute parts, given a thoroughly engaging account by last night’s Detroit musicians:
Three members of the DSO flute section playing Tchaikovsky (screen shot from last night’s YouTube livestream)
Where Rosenkavalier is concerned, I much confess that I prefer the full-length opera to the excerpts. The “magic” resides in the relationship between the music and the overall narrative. When selections are performed, they tend to be most meaningful only to those that know the whole story. The most significant case in point concerns the most familiar instrumental waltz, which is actually providing background for a scheming scoundrel! Fortunately, I could engage my own memories of the opera as context for Bignamini’s performance and could fully appreciate the excerpts he performed!
