Back-to-back Rach: the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed last night the Variations on a Theme of Paganini by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and up-and-coming French conductor Stéphane Denève will lead the San Francisco Symphony this week in Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. We review the concert here and spoke with maestro Denève there. Also of note this week: tomorrow SF Opera opens an exciting new production of Handel's Partenope, and pianist Lara Downes hosts another one of her Artist Sessions, welcoming this time Kathleen Suppove who will explode pianos at the Center for New Music.
You said: "Many of the world’s orchestras, in my view, follow an unhealthy repertoire diet - 21st-century music amounts to less than 5 per cent of their activity." Yet in San Francisco, it will amount to 0%. How come?
Stéphane: As a guest conductor, you create a program with the orchestra. There are many constraints. The soloist suggests her repertory, what she has available. Here it's the Britten violin concerto, that is not played very often. Then, there are other choices, like to do Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. These two pieces share in common to have been created in New York City; Rachmaninoff was in New York on Long Island and Britten had left Britain and stayed in the US during the War. The dates for the premieres are very similar, it's January 41 for the Dances and March 40 for the Concerto. To add to this, we were looking for something from the same period, and Barber has his Adagio in 1938, created in New York by Toscanini. It ends up being a very pretty theme of a Russian, British and American composers all in New York City at the same time, it's a perfect program. As a guest conductor, I try to bring in pieces from the 21st century. Some places tell me no. SF, thanks to MTT, is very open and has many very interesting programs.
The word 'diet' means something that's not necessarily tasty, but that's good for you. To what extent do the audience want to hear 21st century repertoire?
Stéphane: There was a period in the history of symphonic music where composers would create avant-garde, Modernist pieces with a lot of atonal noise everywhere that were very difficult to listen to. To a great extent, it has created the cliche that modern music isn't easy, it's dissonant, it's hermetic. Like all cliches, it's an exaggeration. And it has been changing a lot, there are many more pieces that are more accessible, more emotionally moving, more lyrical and more melodic. I simply think you should manage to choose the nice pieces which have these qualities, and they'll find a larger audience. There are so many wonderful things to discover, so many new pieces. You don't want to exaggerate in the other direction of ignoring this repertory, and the classical concert hall becomes a museum. You have to keep the classical repertory has to be kept alive, it's a matter of finding the right balance.
You are creating this Centre for Future Orchestral Repertoire as part of your appointment as Chief Conductor of the Brussels Philharmonic, and reading its description as a place to aggregate information about all the modern pieces performed by all orchestras all over the world, it sounds like Big Data for the Classical world.
Stéphane: It's simpler than this. In San Francisco, you hear a lot about Big Data. But I just realized that the international communication between the orchestra's artistic directors, the conductors, the composer and the audience does not work any long with respect to contemporary music. There are composers who have a local recognition, but only few you are played all over the world. Of course, you've always had national artistic movements and composers who stayed within their own borders. But to give you an example: consider Blue Cathedral, which I conducted during my last visit with the SF Symphony in 2009 [ed: our preview of the performance].
It has been played an incredible 567 times by 290 orchestras since 2000. Yet, when I speak of this pièce in Germany, thé artistic directors haven't heard of it. And in the other direction, you can consider Detlef Glanert, who has been composer-in-residence with the Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw, has been played nine times at the Proms in London, and still some great US orchestras do not know him. There is not enough communication, so we are creating a global repository which will inventory all the existing pieces in the modern repertory and will give ways to find them, as well as provide some statistical aspects: what is played more in the US or in France, what pieces are the most performed. The goal is to help understand contemporary music and to establish some pieces into the mainstream repertoire.
Here you are conducting Rachmaninoff, who is a composer who seemed to turn his back to modernism, to be neoclassical in some sense.
Stéphane: I strongly disagree with this. Without being a polemicist, I don't agree that Rachmaninoff was not modern for his time. It is true that he started to compose much earlier, he's more ancient than Britten or Barber! But mostly, his harmonic richness is much deeper that you believe. He stays very melodic, he is one of the most beloved composers, and every time I study his music, I find a depth in his composing, and hidden codes all over his Symphony Dances. It's remarkable, and not at all turned towards the past. He has his own voice, and that is the principal lesson about great composers, then and now: they have created their own language. To find a historical logic to music, a sense of progress, to find some composers more revolutionary than others, it's only a reading crib sheet to provide an artificial framework to talk about music, it's irrelevant. What matters is that a composer find his own style. The question of the novelty of the composing language becomes accessory.
About the Britten violin concerto, you said: “There’s almost nothing there,” regarding the composer’s spare orchestration, “Yet somehow this music works — very powerfully. This is the writing of someone who was supremely confident in his craft, of knowing exactly what he wanted, of what the design needed to sound like.”
Stéphane: As always with Britten, the orchestration is very spare. It's beautiful just to look at Britten's score, it's almost like the doodling you do while you're on hold on the phone, the little drawings, the scribbles. It's almost like a madrigal in the way it's written, very simple and very graphical. There's very little ornament, it's very direct and straightforward, yet it tells so many things. Reading it, it seems synthetic, systematic, yet how beautiful it is!
After the LPO performance of Russian music at Davies Symphony Hall: the hunt for Orange October.
The London Philharmonic Orchestra at Davies Symphony Hall: You've heard the LPO in the soundtrack for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for which they won an Oscar. From that line on their illustrious resume, you would expect an epic bombastic sound. Indeed they did blast off the roof when visiting SF in a concert on Monday night at Davies Symphony Hall (we did not attend a different program the night before).
An orchestra on tour plays pieces which underline its strengths and affinities. In the LPO's case, Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony provided just the right range for conductor Vladimir Jurowski to show off the wonders of his band: the symphony has a bit of everything to feature everyone. We did not listen to it as a war time message on the suffering of the Russian people (it was composed in 1943), but as an audition tool for the different sections of the orchestra. And yet, Shostakovich's genius came through. The opening Adagio is by itself a momentous work, where Shostakovich explores textures through a slow sonic metamorphosis, an idea rediscovered in the curtain raiser, Chorale written in 2002 by Magnus Lindberg. The instruments emit sustained tones or short motives, rather than well defined melodies, and gradually exchange these between different groups. Jurowski always kept a great clarity while at the same time fusing the different colors into a rich fabric. The piece evolves into an ostinato of the basses and cellos on top of which the violins embroider repetitive motives, predating Philip Glass by oh, forty years.
David Byrne explained in his book How Music Works that sound level limits in night clubs forced music producer to come up with methods to make the sound feel louder while staying within the constraints. Shostakovich worked with his own constraints, namely an upper bound of a hundred acoustic instruments on stage, but had figured out the same tricks of spacing the instruments over a large register, or pairing timbers that would add up rather than cancel out each others. The LPO may have been the loudest orchestra we've heard, even during a strings-only climax, where they were spaced as far apart on the scale as possible. (As far as their physical spacing on the stage, Jurowski changed it in between the two halves, splitting the violins for the Shostakovich).
Still in the Adagio, the timpani (an amazing and quite busy Simon Carrington) and the trombones interjects into the music together. Now, it's one thing to create sound by banging on a drum, and another by breathing into a mouthpiece. Yet both sounds were repeatedly of exactly of the same quality, same impulse, same length, as if from the same instrument. The long haunting English horn solo (Sue B&otrema;bling) had an eerie poetry.
In the later movements, there is a more sustained energy, a machine-like pulsation that Jurowski never let relent. In the Allegro Third movement, the rhythmic beat is exchanged by the violas, then the trombones, then, after a Spanish tinged interlude, the timpani. These sections all play it with the same accents, the same intent, will and vision which transcend the instruments, yet they bring out their specific colors. The final concludes with the basses stepping out like giant cat paws.
Magnus Lindberg's Chorale, loosely based on a phrase from a J.S. Bach cantata, displayed the same cohesion with the same strong personalities of the musicians. Lindberg uses repeatedly a THX movie theater sound effect, when noise progressively coalesces into a loud reverberant major chord. He also builds his structure on top of the Baroque rhythmic patterns, where the overall beat is steady, and it's the notes which gets shorter, from full note to quarter notes. The LPO extracted lovely colors out of the piece.
And it sounded fantastic in the latest variations of Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Paganini, which require a great big sound. The rest of the performance lacked sensitivity, with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet playing the notes at dazzling speed, but often being off the downbeat of his conductor, and never infusing the concerto with much emotions.
Stephane Deneve conducts. Picture by Tom Finnie.
