from the Digital Concert Hall Web page for this program
In the interest of social distancing to minimize the contagion of COVID-19, the Berliner Philharmonie, the home of the Berlin Philharmonic, has been closed to the general public; and, as of this writing, it will remain so until April 19. This decision was made early this month at a time when Simon Rattle had returned to Berlin to lead the orchestra in a program consisting of Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia” and Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra.” Bearing in mind the risks of physical proximity, both the ensemble and its conductor decided that the concert should be presented as planned. However, it would be performed without an audience, exclusively in the Digital Concert Hall.
The Digital Concert Hall library now includes the recording of that concert, which was made this past March 12. The performance was preceded by some introductory remarks by Rattle in which he confessed that he had no idea how this experiment would be received. Having just watched the video document, I have to say that there was much to appreciate, beginning with the fact that the orchestra itself “substituted” for the audience by applauding Rattle as he entered the stage at the very beginning of the event. This spirit of making the best out of a difficult social context prevailed throughout the entire recording.
Rattle provided eleven minutes of spoken introduction prior to the Bartók performance in the second half of the program. Writing as one that began listening to and studying this composition seriously during my freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I have to say that I was very impressed with Rattle’s presentation. There were any number of fresh perspectives on the music that I encountered, and I was particularly impressed that Rattle delivered all of his material without ever resorting to a first person pronoun. His impressions may not have changed my personal thoughts about the music, but they definitely held my attention.
I moved from Philadelphia to Cambridge in 1963 shortly after Erich Leinsdorf was named Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). One of his first recordings (possibly the first recording) he made in that capacity was of the Bartók concerto. For all I know, I could have attended the concert at which he performed the music during my freshman year; but I was too busy trying to be a good freshman. However, as I became more familiar with this music, I was drawn to the earlier recording made by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner. Bartók had been Reiner’s piano teacher; and Reiner was one of the key figures that persuaded Serge Koussevitzky, then the BSO Music Director, to commission the “Concerto for Orchestra.” While the premiere of that composition was recorded and subsequently released, Reiner’s interpretation has remained my “gold standard.”
That said, Rattle’s interpretation left me with little (if any) cause for complaint. While my Reiner recording has not lost its status, I continue to value my recording of Rattle conducting the concerto with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He clearly understands the full spectrum of emotional dispositions that cut across the concerto’s five movements. He appreciates and conveys the humor of the even-numbered movements (and I do not mind that some of my favorite details did not “make the cut” in his introduction); and the wide scope of dynamic range could not have done better justice to the longer odd-numbered movements. Furthermore, the final movement emerged as a triumphant life-affirming assertion made by a dying man.
Mind you, my usual quibbles about disoriented camera work are still maintained; but this was definitely a case in which listening to the music would prevail over any irritation with the video.
The Berio selection was another matter. “Sinfonia” was composed in 1969 on a commission for celebrating the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. Berio had been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University during my senior year at MIT (where, at the same time, Elliott Carter was a Visiting Professor). Ironically, Berio seems to have spent less time with the Harvard Music Faculty, preferring instead to get to know many of the pioneers of what we now call “cognitive science” at both Harvard and MIT.
As a result, when I had to write about the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) performance of “Sinfonia” in September of 2016, I described the piece as “a massive experiment in sensemaking, that process by which the mind behind the sensory organs figures out how to differentiate signal from noise.” Sadly, in his efforts to account for all that he had absorbed from faculty members at Harvard and MIT, Berio created a score into which he threw in everything but the kitchen sink (which may actually be lurking in one corner of the score I have not yet investigated thoroughly). For example, the second movement is a microlevel syllabic decomposition of the name of Martin Luther King, while the third movement is a wild collage whose sources are so numerous that they probably have yet to be cataloged. The soloists performing with the Philharmonic were the members of the Swingle Singers; and, when they were not vocalizing phonemes they were delivering texts by authors such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Samuel Beckett.
The result amounted to a stew that had so many ingredients that one could barely taste anything. When the work was first performed, Berio had completed only four of the five movements he had planned; but they were more than enough to exhaust even the most devoted listener. Columbia then released the recording of those four movements, and I have to say that the engineering could not have been better. This was probably one of the best examples in which the recording could give a better account of the score than any “live” performance.
Unfortunately, the technical crew for the Digital Concert Hall could not rise to that same level of quality. The usual problems of poor decisions regarding which cameras should be looking where at what point in the score were compounded by almost no evident judgement in mixing the plethora of sound sources coming through the full array of microphones. The bottom line is that Columbia’s approach to mixing all of those sources remains a “gold standard” of its own; and it would not surprise me to learn that Berio himself had a strong hand in directing all of those mixing efforts.
Is this the sort of music that can only be appreciated in performance? My personal opinion is that this is probably not the case. When I wrote about the SFS concert, I described “Sinfonia” as “one of those rare examples in which it may be unlikely that any performance will rise to the level of any of the available recordings.” While that is probably still the case, I realize that at least one subsequent recording, in which Berio was not involved, also fell significantly short of the mark. This would be the 2014 Ondine release of Hannu Lintu conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Although I have been impressed with many of Lintu’s recordings of recent compositions, I fear that even his recording team would have done a better job had Berio been around to provide better input (impossible since Berio had died in 2003).
Like it or not, “Sinfonia” may well be one of those you-had-to-be-there compositions, at least if “there” involves listening to how Berio engineered the mixing for the incomplete Columbia recording.
No comments:
Post a Comment