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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™ 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.
Rachmaninov's Remedy for Coughing
Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme of Corelli Op.42 was the only solo piano work he wrote in all his years of exile in the USA. It was a set of 20 variations based on Corelli's Twelfth Violin Sonata, and for the composer, a treatise upon which he followed with the Paganini Variations. Corelli himself had based his sonata on the antique dance melody La Folia.
It was in performing the Corelli Variations that Rachmaninov (for better or worse) felt that local American audiences had short attention spans. (He had no way, of course, of knowing how music video, quick cuts and sound bites would come to dominate the mass media in the latter 20th century.) When he wrote to Medtner, the dedicatee of the Corelli Variations, he stated that,
"I've played (the Op. 42 variations) about fifteen times, but of these fifteen performances, only one was good. Not once have I played these all in continuity. I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing would increase, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order. In one concert, I don't remember where, some small town, the coughing was so violent that I played only ten variations (out of twenty). My best record was set in New York, where I played 8 variations. However, I hope that you will play all of them, and that you will not 'cough'."
Rachmaninov never had to put up with things like cellular phones, velcro and crinkly plastic bags. One can only imagine.
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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.
Benjamin
Chee doesn't watch many Merchant Ivory pictures, either.
Photo of Lorin Maazel taken from the Lorin
Maazel webpage
Photo of Lang Lang taken from the Vancouver Recital Society webpage
31.10.2002
© Benjamin Chee
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