In its 160th year of existence, the New York Philharmonic finally makes its début in Kuala Lumpur. This is not to forget 1985, when the local authorities objected to the inclusion of Jewish-American composer Ernst Bloch's Schelomo on the programme that resulted in a cancellation of their planned visit then. This time round, having made it, they played an identical programme to the one in Hong Kong at an earlier leg of their tour: Barber, Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky, right down to the encores by Tan Dun, Glinka and Brahms.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. The Malaysian audience, of course, was no stranger to Lang Lang, who scaled Rachmaninov 3 here at the Dewan Filharmonik PETRONAS less than a year ago with the St Petersburg Philharmonic. A pity that he had only Rach 2 to offer on his return - while I'm sure many looked forward to more of his barnstorming bravura, I had personally hoped for something further afield from the Nationalist-Romantic genre.

This was another audience heavily dominated by a corporate chi-chi crowd: everyone, but everyone, was dressed to the Nth power. For once there were actually more gents in suits than in batik shirts. And why not ? Everyone likes to be invited to these things - it shows acceptance among your peer group, allows you to mix and relish their company, strengthen your affiliations, and affirms your legitimate place in that faction. (Plus, making it to the social pages of the local Tattler isn't half bad, either.)

When I went into the hall, parts of the orchestra were already on stage, sawing and blowing away - not something often seen at the Dewan. Maybe it was too crowded backstage. For the curtain-raiser, the New Yorkers offered Barber's School for Scandal Overture. (Inevitably. We would not have expected them to travel without at least a Barber, Copland, Ives or Bernstein in the luggage case.) A dazzling beginning of brass, a quiet theme over whispering venticelli, but what was truly notable were the woodwinds: solo oboe and clarinet playing the second theme with panache. The result was crisp, but Maazel's paint-by-numbers take on the whole was straightforward and unexciting, especially without much range of colour or dynamics.

Rachmaninov - the composer who was equally notable as a virtuoso performer - is said to have had a musical approach, in which a great piece of music only has one real climax, and the performer's imperative is to strive to relate everything to that point of culmination: either the whole made sense, or none did. The reality, of course, is quite often otherwise: Andrei Gavrilov famously sent audiences howling (not literally) out of the Victoria Concert Hall in Singapore, on the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, with his antics on Rachmaninov's Third.

Lang Lang's approach to Rachmaninov's Second this time was mostly unvaried from his previous visit: prodigious technique, impeccable fingerwork, chock-full of kinetic energy. From the opening eight characterful tolls to the exposition of the broad melody, his was a tumescence of physical activity that, quite frankly, distracted from the musicality. No steady, dramatic ascent, then, to Rachmaninov's aforesaid apex, but rather, a series of chain explosions, helter-skelter, designed more to impress than to express. (To be sure, there was a mushroom cloud at the end of the first movement, but that was a tad premature.)

Maazel, impressively conducting without score, followed his young companion with loyalty and tact. It would not have been easy to miss the orchestral canvas voicing each of the long-breathed melodies as one great, unmissable phrase. At one point in the slow movement, it almost seemed that the strings were floating over Lang Lang's intricate piano figurations in a surreal role-reversal, with Maazel meticulously shaping, shading every note that came from the ensemble. The mellow French horn giving the recapitulation of the theme in the second movement was simply to die for.

At the end, the audience all but leapt to their feet in unanimous ovation, throwing bravos like nobody's business. How could they not have ? Lang Lang's playing is wilful, visceral, even seductive, in its intensity - perhaps in the same way that eye-candy in a George Lucas picture will sell more tickets and toys than, say, something from Merchant Ivory. It was ultimately a reading less sui generis to Rachmaninov than a vehicle for the Chinese prodigy, with a supporting cast of 80 musicians and conductor. At the end of a great music performance, the audience should have fallen in love with the music; at the end of this great music performance, all they loved was the musician. At least he didn't wave his hand and start conducting at the orchestra this time.

The encore Lang Lang offered was a folk melody from Tan Dun's Eight Sketches with Hunan Accent which, when announced to the audience, elicited a clichéd wave of "ooohs" and "aaahs" through the auditorium as they turned to look at each other, knowingly, making little cute noises of approbation. A cunning choice of composer.

There was no Came-For-Concerto^TM crowd this time round - too much of a brand label sitting on the concert platform to walk out on - and everyone gamely stuck it out through Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Curiously, the orchestra was seated flat on stage and not back-elevated: I'm sure this affected the quality of group's timbre.

For most of the first movement, Maazel's interpretation was rather straightforward - I found myself stifling two yawns, despite some smart playing from the woodwinds (to whom, I confess, I found myself very partial.) It was not until the beautiful French horn solo in the second movement, maybe about fifteen minutes into the symphony, that the music finally engaged me. The only jarring note was the ineluctable interruption of metallic chords by the brass towards the close of the movement, which, arriving after a tableau of solo woodwinds, came across as rather harsh and incongruent.

But the brasses served the music well in the finale, after an uncannily melancholy third-movement Florentine waltz. Along with the timpani, woodwinds and strings, all came together in a glowing rainbow of instrumental colour. Maazel kept the polyphonic development taut and compact, propelling the tempi along to its bombastic end - yet, I felt that Maazel did not convincingly put his signature on the work. There could have been more of a feel of spontaniety (rather than just well-rehearsed) and too much, with the exception of the occasional instrumental spotlight, was pithily contained for too long.

It's almost embarassing to say that I enjoyed the two encores more than the main courses. The first was a runaway train of Glinka's Overture to You-Know-Who and Who. Totally breakneck speed with laser-point precision. They had a sense of humour, too. In the reprise of Ruslan's melody O Ljudmila, Lel' sulil mne radost', the low strings - violas on melody and cellos giving the bass-walk rhythm - executed a dimunuendo down to a comically-low pianissimo, earning them a satisfied grin and nod of the head from the 73-year-old conductor, before he turned the volume dial back up.

The second of the two encores was Brahms's First Hungarian Dance in G minor - it allowed Maazel to add his own quirky twists of tempo and demonstrate his mastery over the orchestra, but failed to make enough of it a rah-rah showstopper to send the crowd out on a buzz. By this point, though, I don't think that the audience really cared: certainly they had not been put out by the intrusive noises, nor the indulgences of the soloist, nor the hit-and-miss delivery of the Tchaikovsky. It had been a good show that they could tell their friends about.

Clarissa Lee learns the meaning of beauty in life through Mahler's last symphony

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10.10.2002 © Clarissa

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