Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Heard Orpheus Chamber Orchestra again last night, at Carnegie Hall. Did not care very much for the score or the playing of Tippett's Divertimento on "Sellinger's Round" with its English musical allusions.  Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the French pianist, came on next to play, with Louis Hanzlik on trumpet, Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor. First time I heard the piano concerto, and I loved it for its youthful brio. It brimmed with ideas and moved with zip. Thibaudet was poetic where the music was poetic and brash where it was brash. A tad too civilized, perhaps, but that might be my prejudice against the French. After the intermission, we heard Honegger's languorous evocation of a summer morning. Pastorale d’été was quite lovely, if not exactly ground-breaking. Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings concluded the program. Lush and sentimental. I hated it. I thought the musicians were on auto-pilot. Here was where an original interpreter--a conductor, ...

I think I may fall in love with Leonard Bernstein. His Symphony No. 2, inspired by W. H. Auden's poem "The Age of Anxiety," is melancholic yet optimistic, colorful yet witty, and, in its hospitality to different musical genres like jazz and big band, so generous. It captures what I like to think of as the best of New York. Bernstein is supposed to have said that he did not prefer any particular cuisine, musical genre or form of sex. A discriminating omnivorousness. Jean-Yves Thibaudet was poetic and funny on the piano. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Dudamel, attacked the music with discipline and gusto. (Glyn Maxwell wrote an interesting piece comparing the poem unfavorably to the symphony.) It made Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 "Pathetique" sound very old hat to me after the intermission. LW had the opposite reaction. The music was sculpted with emotional precision by Dudamel and his musicians. I could almost see the swirl of cream in the air above t...

Heard with EN last night the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, led by a young vivacious conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The strings were especially silky and bright. Jean-Yves Thibaudet played Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major (1859) with great panache, but the work strove too hard for effects and seemed to lack a coherent shape. I did not enjoy much either Richard Strauss's programmatic Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) (1898), though the orchestra played it with gusto, and received calls for an encore after it. Three trumpets left the stage at one point, and played off stage to sound like faraway horns. Neat effect. The piece I liked best of the evening was the program opener, Messiaen's Les offrandes oubli ées, méditation symphonique (1930). In contemplating the Cross, the Sin and the Eucharist, it renewed convincingly an old devotion.