So rather than a review as such, let me talk first a little bit about programming. The new piece on this program was the Viola Concerto by Australian composer Brett Dean; this was the Australian premiere. As it happens, the US premiere will be given here in Los Angeles in October. (The Sydney Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are among the co-commissioners of the concerto.)
The Los Angeles program is precisely what you would expect from most American orchestras when programming a major piece of new music. It's practically a formula: Start the concert with sort of pleasant little bonbon -- a Copland ballet suite, maybe, or a Rossini overture; perhaps one of the shorter Haydn or Mozart symphonies. Then comes the premiere, and after intermission, one of the major audience-pleasing warhorses. The Planets or Enigma Variations, or a symphony by Brahms or Tchaikovsky -- something popular enough to make the audience willing to sit through the scary new music.
Apply the formula, and you get this program for the American premiere of Dean's concerto:
- Haydn, Symphony No. 82, "The Bear"
- Dean, Viola Concerto
- INTERMISSION
- Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition
(And the LA Phil will follow the formula again with its other major concerto premiere later in the season, surrounding John Harbison's Bass Viol Concerto with Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen Suite and Dvorak's 7th Symphony.)
Now here's the program presented in Sydney for the Australian premiere of the same concerto:
- Schoenberg, Notturno for strings and harp
- Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4
- INTERMISSION
- Dean, Viola Concerto
- Strauss, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), Op. 24
No sweet little bonbon to open the concert (well, the Notturno actually is a sweet little bonbon, but it's not a well enough known piece to overcome the fear that the name "Schoenberg" puts into the hearts of many casual concertgoers), and while Verklärte Nacht and Tod und Verklärung both have their devotees, neither is quite the audience magnet that Holst or Elgar might be. And the concerto is presented after intermission, giving the audience the chance to run away. It is, all things considered, an ambitious and gutsy program.
It is not, I confess, a program that filled my heart with glee. The Notturno, which I hadn't heard before, is a charming miniature, 3 or 4 minutes long; that's about the length of my patience for strings-only music. Be it a quartet or a string orchestra, I find myself rapidly yearning for a flute or a tuba or a triangle or anything to break the timbral monotony. So when we continued on to the string orchestra version of Verklärte Nacht, I grew bored fairly quickly.
As for Strauss, well, I prefer Johann to Richard, and if it must be Richard, let it be Till Eulenspiegel, or something else on the relatively playful side; Tod und Verklärung is Strauss in one of his gloomy philosophical moods, which is all a bit much for me.
And then there's Dean's Viola Concerto, in which he played the solo part himself. The work is in three movements: Fragment (Unhurried, yet flowing); Pursuit (Presto); Veiled and Mysterious (Distant, dark). The first movement is very brief, only 2 or 3 minutes; the other movements are each about 12 or 13 minutes (the program notes give the total length of the concerto as 27 minutes).
The solo viola was, to my ears, too often buried and lost in the orchestral texture. During his pre-concert talk, Dean addressed this issue, and said that he had struggled with the question of balance throughout the writing of the piece, as the viola doesn't have the piercing qualities of the violin or the cello; ultimately, he decided that he wasn't bothered by it. We've been spoiled by recordings, he said, in which the soloist is always placed well in front of the orchestral sound, and that's not always an accurate representation of how music sounds in the concert hall; further, he thought it somehow in keeping with the "less heroic" nature of the viola that it should not always be the dominant presence.
All of which is well and good from a philosophical standpoint, I suppose, but from a listener's point of view, it was rather annoying to so often see Dean sawing away and have no idea what he was playing. Given that Dean has been the soloist in all performances of the piece thus far (as he will be in Los Angeles in October), and that conductor Simone Young has led several of the previous performances with other orchestras, it seems fair to assume that the balance they were getting was the balance they wanted.
The concerto is not principally about melody; it's largely about tone color, which can be an interesting and effective way to organize a piece. To make it interesting, though, requires more variety and creativity in orchestration than Dean showed. There were only two moments that stood out for me as interesting or memorable. The first came late in the second movement, where we would traditionally find the cadenza; this wasn't exactly a cadenza, but it was as close as the piece came to having one. The solo viola has a dialogue of sorts with a muted trombone, which plays jittery little passages, sounding like a grumpy old man muttering under his breath. The other noteworthy effect comes at the very end of the piece, when the oboe and English horn play fragmented melodies, while above them, the viola plays very slow downward glissandos -- say, 4 or 5 seconds to drop a quarter-tone -- in the highest part of its register.
I can't say I found the piece a success, but it is certainly possible that my lack of enthusiasm for the rest of the program colored my response. I do look forward to hearing it again with a different orchestra and conductor, surrounded by music for which I have more affection.
My reservations about the repertoire should not be taken to apply to the Sydney Symphony itself, which is a very fine group, or to the performances, which were top-notch. Simone Young is an energetic presence, and her more emphatic upbeats are so vigorous as to lift her feet off the floor. The sound in the Concert Hall at the Sydney Opera House is superb, and the hall itself is an attractive and comfortable place to hear a concert. After suffering in the cramped quarters of LA's Disney Hall for two years, it was especially refreshing to have sufficient legroom.
Also noteworthy was that the concert was being broadcast live throughout Australia by the national radio network, and there was less audience noise than I've ever heard at a symphony concert before.
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