Man of monuments and sermons
The average years of the four-spot conductors named on the masthead of the Philharmonia Orchestra, which made its Walt Disney Concert Student residence debut Tues night, is 81. And quadruplet months. The 78-year-old Christoph von Dohnányi, wHO is leading his final term of enlistment with the London orchestra, is principal conductor. In the settle, he will become honorary music director for life, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, world Health Organization volition be 50 at the time, will use up over.
This will be a fascinating generational transfer in the life of a comparatively edward Young orchestra with a history of associations with old school maestros. Founded at the end of Existence Warfare II as a recording ensemble, it hooked up early on with Toscanini, Furtwängler and particularly Victor Herbert von Karajan. It has flirted with audacious early days: Riccardo Muti and Giuseppe Sinopoli lED it early in their careers. Salonen was principal client conductor from 1985 to 1994. Just the orchestra is still at least passably identified with the formidable Otto Klemperer, world Health Organization served as music director from 1959 to 1972. Klemperer was medicine managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for most of the 1930s. Now Salonen moves in the opposite guidance.
Meanwhile, the Philharmonia is, at the moment, one weighty supporting players. Besides Dohnányi, the set boasts associations with Kurt Crocethia alba (conductor emeritus), Charles II Mackerras (dealer client conductor) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor laureate).
Dohnányi's term of enlistment is wholly marrow and potatoes. For Tuesday's concert, he light-emitting diode Mendelssohn's Fourth ("Italian") Symphony and Mahler's First. Tonight at the Orange County Acting Artscenter, he is scheduled to echo Wednesday's Walter Elias Disney broadcast: Beethoven's "Egmont" Feeler, Schumann's Number 1 Symphony and Beethoven's Fifth. If Tuesday was any meter reading, anyone planning to serve tonight's concert shouldn't expect an Elgar encore, or any encore. And no one should attend in a mood for frivolity. These concerts are serious occupation.
During his long career, and particularly during his land tenure as medicine director of the Cleveland Orchestra in the '80s and '90s, Dohnányi admirably championed new and difficult music, American as well as European. These days, though, he is seen as one of the last of the great traditionalists. When the L.A. Philharmonic is looking at for that Old World feeling, it brings in Dohnányi, as it did for a Brahms symphony cycle last season.
What this conductor offers to the highest degree of totally is a sense of security. Mendelssohn's "Italian" wasn't exactly Latin. The tempos may have been on the quick english, but Dohnányi's Italy is a soil of burnished monuments that have been around for a long time. He likes a thick, molded sound, something that bottom give the picture that things haven't changed practically for centuries. When death in L.A., he experimented by having the risers removed, seating the Philharmonic players altogether on i stage to get a better orchestral blend. With the Philharmonia on Tuesday, he countenance the risers stay. Still, no subdivision stood come out, demur on a few occasions when the ensemble playing wasn't precise -- string section, winds and brass instrument totally had their tyke slip-ups. Simply the main mental picture was of purposeful performing, thick textures and, in the slow drift, a pleasing gleaming.
The Mahler First is not by a long shot the heaviest of the composer's symphonies, only Dohnányi conducts as if he bears the woe of the public on his shoulders. Gustav Mahler had nature on his mind. Dawn breaks at the begin. Peasants dance. A round of drinks to "Frère Jacques" becomes a woeful coronach. A storm brews. The philharmonic ends in wonderful triumph.
Everything in Dohnányi's performance got extra desirability. The high harmonics at the start were oddly ominous. The basses and aloud brass grounded the symphonic music so efficaciously that they mightiness take been glued to the stage. I missed any sense of play, of jeopardize and phantasy, in Dohnányi's approaching. Just if this was the symphonic music as preaching, the oratory was fiery, the logic irrefutable, and you simply had to pay attention.
One can combat Dohnányi's stern approach. I tried. Merely the players clearly paul Revere this conductor. And in the ending, when the governing body stood and played too loud for the granville Stanley Hall, when the clotted strings and winds became a sonic uSA, when Dohnányi's horse sense of mission produced a startling flood tide, resistance seemed futile. Something important was said, and hearing it proved really satisfying.
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