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The Man is Back Los Angeles
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center
01/06/2001 -
Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 99
Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 7
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
On Saturday night, Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to the Philharmonic after his sabbatical year with a program of Haydn and Bruckner, two composers close to his heart. Not surprisingly for a charismatic musician who thinks seriously about his art, Salonen’s performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony both upset convention and aroused the audience.
In this ultimate romantic symphony, with its arching shape, cosmic length and melodies of which Schubert would have been proud, Salonen decided against developing continuity by seamlessly transitioning between each movement’s larger emotional sections. Instead, he used an unconventional speed scheme that de-electrified the tension that most other conductors find: He was glacially slow in the first movement, more Andante than Adagio in the second, and painfully slow again at the opening of the fourth movement. He broke each movement into distinct episodes, each with its own moments of power and glory, by unblinkingly shifting speeds and varying expressive intensity. Dangers lie in taking such a deconstructionist tack: Bruckner's structural mechanisms are only superficially episodic, and in emphasizing them rather than trying to knit them together, a conductor risks losing his or her audience. But Salonen knows the music inside out, and his ability to be decisive and convincing with virtually every note paid dividends. Traditionalists might have preferred the romantic ecstasy of a Wilhelm Furtwängler, but there can be no denying that the miracle of Brucknerian devotion Salonen and the Philharmonic achieved brought down the house.
Salonen's ability to pull off his unconventional approach also depended entirely on an orchestra which could respond with kind of deep commitment and selfless virtuosity in which emotion is given priority over precision, in which awe is given priority over cleverness. In fact, the Philharmonic gave so much of themselves that intonation in the strings suffered occasionally and several times the great brass section, turbo-charged with a superb phalanx of Wagner tubas, cracked. We rarely hear imperfections in studio recordings, but the human frailty of live performances is what makes for truly great performances.
During an interview in 1991, Salonen told me that learning the Bruckner, although "it's fairly straightforward music in many senses," meant taking a lot of time "to find basic answers to the incredible questions about its form. With any piece of music, one has to live with it until the solutions cease being intellectual," he said, "and begin becoming organic. In music like Bruckner, it's going from the overall shape down to detail level. On the other hand, “Salonen pointed out, “in music like Debussy, it can be completely opposite. Debussy avoided overall strategy, collected details until he had enough, and played with them until he had the shape and size he wanted. Bruckner began with one block which he divided into smaller and smaller units until he could start filling in." This, and his performance Saturday night, reminded me of the writer who said that, unlike two-dimensional linear symphonies, listening to a symphony by Bruckner was like looking at a magnificent sculpture from a slowly shifting array of angles and perspectives.
Haydn, whose 99th Symphony began the evening, shares with Bruckner the subtle structural asymmetries and deconstructionist use of melody that Salonen seems attracted to. It can’t be Haydn’s sense of humor and charm that appeals to Salonen for these are personal qualities which the conductor usually keeps tightly to himself (except, curiously, in his own music). In any event, the Philharmonic lacked the knife-edge control that Salonen’s approach to Haydn demands. The strings (as they often do in the mainstream classical repertoire) lacked clarity, and the woodwinds were out of sorts. It was efficient, however, the Menuetto tripped lightly off Salonen’s baton (much more Allegro than Allegretto), and the audience seemed to enjoy it.
Next week, Salonen returns with a program that plays to his more customary strengths: Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Ravel’s Shéhérazade and a bouquet of Scandinavian songs sung by Anne Sofie von Otter, and Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony.
Laurence Vittes
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