This past Friday PBS broadcast Great Performances: LA Phil 100, a video document of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first performance, presented at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on October 24, 2019. Programming was particularly distinguished for bringing together three conductors, current Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, joined by two past Music Directors, Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta, who led the ensemble from 1962 to 1978, and Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen, whose directorship took place between 1992 and 2009. The conductors performed in “chronological order,” each bringing his own distinctive repertoire choices.
Mehta led off with a performance of the concert version of the prelude to the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (the master-singers of Nuremberg), which he followed with Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse.” Salonen then performed a single selection, Witold Lutosławski’s fourth symphony, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and given its world premiere with Lutosławski conducting. Dudamel’s contribution was the second of the three suites that Igor Stravinsky had extracted from his score for the ballet “The Firebird,” that suite having been compiled in 1919. The program then concluded with another commissioned composition, this one written especially for this centennial occasion. Daníel Bjarnason, curator of LA Phil’s Reykjavik Festival, composed “From Space I Saw Earth,” whose score required all three conductors to perform. Dudamel took the front-and-center podium to lead the strings and percussion. The other two conductors led separate groups of winds and percussion from the rear. There was also one percussionist in the organ loft with a snare drum and a set of small tuned cymbals that he bowed.
Rather than watch the broadcast itself, I had xfinity store it in my cloud area, giving me the opportunity to navigate the content, should I find that necessary. I then used this morning to watch all of the musical portions, skipping over the “historical background” material inserted between the selections. It has been my experience that such celebratory occasions often tend to be more about the occasion and less about what is actually being celebrated.
Without a doubt the program selection that made the most lasting impact was the Lutosławski symphony. Those familiar with Salonen’s discography probably know that he recorded all four of Lutosławski’s symphonies for Sony during his tenure in Los Angeles. However, I have to confess that, while I have managed to get my head around much of the composer’s chamber music (due in no small part to experiences at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music), his full-orchestra music never really registered with me, even when I chose to write about Sony’s release of all of the recordings Salonen had made for that label.
Watching Salonen in action was quite another matter. One of Lutosławski’s most interesting qualities was his approach to using aleatoric (chance-based) processes, often in a context of thick orchestration of highly diverse instrumental sonorities. When his textures are at their thickest, even the most attentive listener cannot distinguish the full-notated passages from the aleatoric ones. However, when one can watch the conductor, one can see when he is allowing the aleatoric content to unfold. As a result, Salonen emerged as an essential “visual guide” through the overall structural logic of this single-movement symphony; and his guidance was expertly supplemented by camera work led by a director that seemed to have enough knowledge of the score to allow even the most casual listener to grasp just what was making the whole composition click.
Salonen was not the only conductor whose highly-informed approach to expressive performance was abetted by equally skillful video work. When Mehta took the stage, it was difficult to suppress the feeling that he was showing his age. At the podium his physical cues were minimal, but one had only to look at his eyes, even through the medium of a video camera, to see that not only was he alert but also he had brought to the podium his own distinctive approaches to his two selections.
Indeed, where video is concerned, both of those selections posed major challenges. In both cases there are more than a few moments of multiple centers of activity distributed across the entire ensemble. “La Valse” has an overall “narrative arc” that begins in hushed ambiguity, goes through a series of ascents in both dynamics and polyphonic activity, and must culminate in one last climax “to rule them all.” Mehta could not have given a clearer account of that arc, and the video direction that accounted for the wide diversity of those centers of activity could not have been better. All that was missing was better audio quality; and I realized that, on more than one occasion, what I was seeing registered in mind even if I was not hearing it clearly through the loudspeakers.
Wagner’s prelude, on the other hand, begins by firing on all cylinders. Only after that initial jolt does he pull back and begin to prepare the listener for what is about to unfold on the stage. Without being too reductive, I would suggest that listening to this prelude is organized around how Wagner treats the two key themes, the music for the procession of the master-singers, which commands the opening measures, and the “Prize Song” with which the young knight Walther von Stolzing wins the hand of Eva, who stole his heart when he saw her in church at the very beginning of the opera’s first act.
Mehta was at the top of his game in managing the interplay of those two themes, building up to that critical moment near the end of the prelude where both of them are playing out at the same time. Considered only in terms of the demands of balance, this prelude is one of the most challenging compositions in the repertoire of tonal music. (Those who have followed my writing for some time are familiar with my aggravation with any performance in which the brass section drowns out everyone else.) If Mehta’s physical bearing was minimal, it was clear that even the slightest gesture had meaningful impact; and the ensemble, taken as a whole, was always with Mehta to make sure that it registered with every attentive listener.
The only disappointment came from Dudamel’s share of the program There is no questioning his understanding of Stravinsky’s score. (I remember when he led the San Francisco Symphony in the entire score for the ballet, and I was more than merely satisfied with what he delivered.) In this particular case, however, it almost seemed as if he was delivering a business-as-usual performance. This may have been because he was willing to let the other two conductors have all the time they needed and did not have enough left over for his own efforts. However, given that he has significant history with this music in Los Angeles, one would have thought that he could have put the time he had to better use.
In the context of all that preceded it, Bjarnason’s composition came across as little more than a parlor trick. Watching it closely, I found it difficult to be convinced that it really required three conductors. The overall texture of the score would probably have endured the serious efforts of a single conductor willing to admit that he could not manage everything with equal priority all the time. (The usual approach would be to assign responsibility to a few knowledgeable section leaders.) The music itself sounded as if it might have won a competition sponsored by Music from the Hearts of Space. Still, I have had to endure cornier stunts at previous celebratory occasions; and I definitely cannot complain that the composition went on for too long. The bottom line is that the quality of the virtues I enjoyed was so high that it is easy to forgive the proportionately fewer shortcomings.
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