Los Angeles Philharmonic plays Brahms, Wagner
In their day, Brahms and Richard Wagner divided audiences into angrily opposing camps. Sober conservatives went to the concert hall thankful to Brahms for upholding custom in his beefy symphonies and concertos and sleeping accommodation music. In the meantime, besotted Wagnerians agitated for a music of the future, which could be ground in opera house houses able to encounter the unprecedented musical theater and scenic demands of their German idol.
Thursday nighttime, Esa-Pekka Salonen one time once more pitted classicist against sensualist at Walt Walter Elias Disney Concert Hallway. The first one-half of his Los Angeles Symphony political platform was devoted to Brahms' Arcsecond Pianissimo Concerto, 50 transactions long and written in 1881. Later intermission came 40 minutes' worth of excerpts from Wagner's "Götterdämmerung," the last of his "Tintinnabulation" operas, which was completed in 1874. The equal was a funfair scrap. And a great concert.
In many shipway, the Brahms/Wagner divide was less about the composers than about their following. 60 age ago, Schonberg never tired of singing his students in Los Angeles that Johannes Brahms was a water closet progressive whose thick, chromatic harmonies subverted tonality. And for entirely Wagner's musical advances, no composer ever so became more cursorily canonized.
The L.A. Symphony, in fact, first played music from "Götterdämmerung" in 1921, 2 long time later on the orchestra was founded and sextuplet long time earlier it got around to Brahms' Second Piano Concerto. These days, Wagner's "Ring" is such banner fare that leg directors try harder and harder to keep it newly. Sunday, a freshly production of “Siegfried” opened in Vienna in which Brünnhilde was awakened by the titular hero non on her fire-protected rock simply in a public public convenience.
Although the interpretations of both composers were slimly exterior the norm, the Walt Disney Hall on Thursday felt free of dogma. Leif Ove Andsnes, the popular Norse pianist, was the soloist in the Brahms, and neither he nor Salonen cares a great deal about the soft side of the composer.
That meant that for the "Aimez-vous Brahms?" crowd, the crisp-toned piano and no-nonsense orchestra might have felt a little like internal-combustion engine water used to extinguish whatever smoldering flames of romanticism they find in this, the more lyrical of Brahms' two piano concertos. Distillery, I thought the performance mightiness also have provided a perfect soundtrack for Françoise Sagan's 1959 existential philosopher novel about a disillusioned middle-aged woman and her edward Young lover.
Often the ground at a lower place one's feet was non solid in this performance. Johannes Brahms has a wont in his concerto of creating the impression that the pianoforte is swaying nicely patch the orchestra is precisely adding something cheerily murky underneath. In reality, there are demerit lines in this score.
Andsnes has brilliant technical command. He was true to the notes on the page, incisive in his rhythms and outstanding in his ability to balance rich people Brahmsian textures with revelatory lucidity. On the surface, he played with songful grace, but he and Salonen besides delved deep to a lower place, pointing up rhythmic intricacies and pickings hitting note of dissonances.
Wagner is to a lesser extent blot out. He creates specs of auditory sensation in his orchestra, and "Götterdämmerung" sounded spectacular. Salonen chose the standard orchestral excerpts -- "Dawn and J. B. Rhine Travel" and "Siegfried's Funeral March" -- and ended with Brünnhilde's "Immolation." Soprano Lisa Gasteen was the soloist.
The orchestra was large. Four-spot harps were placed at the lip of the stagecoach in movement of the low gear violins. The horn contingent looked massive, and on that point was unity role player in the balcony for an offstage effect.
As "The Tristan Project" proved a twosome of years ago, Wagner in this hall is something special. Once again Salonen emphasized clarity, the true sounds of instruments rather than mushy thaumaturgy. His is a Wagner without the voodoo. And notwithstanding to hear penetrating brass, singing strings, the refracted colour of the wood winds and the quartette of harps career a listener to paradise is to be in a kind of sonic nirvana.
Once more, an "Aimez-vous Wagner?" contingent could miss some warmness. Gasteen was a tail and angry Brünnhilde, not an ecstatic one. Simply the Australian soprano commands aid. She has a darkness, rich people tone that nates jump above the orchestra when it necessarily to. She went to her funeral funeral pyre a unemotional person, non a religious mystic, which I institute moving.
Also moving, and oftentimes thrilling, were the Philharmonic horns, which had a big night, yet if they started away more or less shaky in the Wagner. Both pieces were built from horn calls, and Eric Overholt and William Lane were the protagonists in Brahms and Richard Wagner, severally. Putz Stumpf provided the lyricism requisite for the violoncello solo in Brahms' slow movement.
mark.swed@latimes.com
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