Concerto as an ISO concert theme ascends naturally to a Bartok summit
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| Bela Bartok (1881-1945) |
the sphere of my interest and feeling locked in to the accomplishments of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchesetra under Jun Märkl, I readily gazed into the crystal ball.
I confidently expected Friday's performance of Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra to be spectacular. I would not be going out on a limb of local patriotism to put my money (figuratively) on a reassertion of the excellence I had heard on January 17.
The performance of the Hungarian composer's crowning masterpiece was bound to confirm my astonishment at the promise of a virtuoso orchestra, which the ISO offered last weekend in Manuel de Falla's "The Three-Cornered Hat." The animated rhythmic precision, the wealth of color, the warmth of tone, and the smoothly woven tapestry of so much expressive variety would inevitably continue with the well-known Bartok work, which fills out the concerto theme of the current Classical Series program. Cash on the barrelhead, no question.
The build-up of tension in the first movement was remarkably well-controlled. Its brass climax, so majestic and glowing, could hardly have been better. For variety of timbre and soloistic grace, even when that grace had to be shared in the second-movement "game of pairs," the performance substantiated playfully the pattern of accents established at the start by the solo drum.
The third-movement Elegia: Andante non troppo brings in Bartok in his signature night-music mode.
For breadth and intensity, the ISO strings have never sounded better. They had a "Philadelphia glow" to them, though I hesitate to invite comparisons to other orchestras in their prime. Let's just say that, under Märkl's baton, these string players are poised to deliver a marvelous account of Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" someday. Now I'm done with predictions, for the moment.
The program notes make too much of analogizing Bartok's health condition when he wrote Concerto for Orchestra to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's "On Death and Dying." To counter that, particularly when applied to the third movement, Intermezzo Interrottto, I offer my vivid memory of the visual parody the creative comedian Ernie Kovacs fashioned of this movement in 1950s TV. (Who, among us of a certain age, can forget the poet Percy Dovetonsils or the Nairobi Trio?).
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| Ernie Kovacs in characteristic portrait |
Romantic serenade music, with Kovacs' video sketch showing a young couple lightly necking on a park bench, is interrupted by a scolding policeman on his beat. His officious interference is depicted musically by a lively tune that becomes a belly laugh, with a snorting trombone at its high point. The cop's change of temper is triggered by a toy the young man displays. This was in fact a product in the Miles Kimball catalogue long ago that I regret never asking from Santa Claus: It was a black box with a switch on top. When you flipped the switch, a white hand emerged from the box, flipped the switch off, then vanished back into the box. That was it: a power toy at its simplest.
In Kovacs' scenario, the couple resume their caressing after the amused cop waddles off, and the score's evocation of bird tweets, which the serenade has depicted intermittently, settles down in the last moments to a shot of that lovely toy in a bird's nest doing its thing one last time. If that's a premonition of death, I'll take it in the Kovacs manner, not the Kübler-Ross interpretation.
When called for, the ISO was properly boisterous in the music of interruption. The high spirits were picked up again in the finale. The work's positive cast I take to be a genuine expression of the dying composer's celebration of life. Modernist ideologues have been known to deplore Bartok's failure to write another "Miraculous Mandarin," but their moment has passed, and he was not retrenching here. Maybe I'm overinterpreting, biased by the fact that Bartok died in New York City eight days after I was born there. The ISO's performance was positive and unapologetic to the core, and put a cap on everything that had preceded it.
The concert began with a charming assertion of life against death. Indiana University doctoral candidate Daixuan Ai introduced to the audience her "Beach Adventure (A Pocket Concerto)." It was written on a commission from the Sing Me a Story Foundation, using a fanciful story created by a 7-year-old cancer survivor with help from her three siblings. Ai's work is a picturesque burst "of imagination all compact," in Shakespeare's phrase, stimulated by a child's vision, but not beholden to any simplistic notion of what orchestral music of this sort should sound like. "Beach Adventure" is a beguiling, cleverly modulated gem of program music.
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| Gabriela Lena Frank: significant history with ISO |
From there the program blossomed further with the ISO's return to the music of Gabriela Lena Frank, who had a two-year residency with the ISO in this century's first decade, in which she got to know the growing Hispanic community here. The work that emerged, Peregrinos (Pilgrims), memorialized the struggles and triumphs of Latino immigrants to the United States. Such a story lies in Frank's background and her music draws upon multiple musical inspirations in Concertino Cusqueño, as her ingratiating and informative program note explains.
With two concertino groups poised against varied massed expressions by the full orchestra, this 2012 composition wears its multiple influences lightly. Benjamin Britten is conspicuously evoked as an inspiration along with the Peruvian culture directly in Frank's heritage. But I also heard the influence of one of her other models, William Bolcom, her composition teacher at the University of Michigan. Very few composers have been entirely comfortable folding in vernacular music in other than a picture-postcard manner, and Bolcom is chief among the unabashed borrowers who own the idioms they convey.
Frank follows suit in this and other works of hers I'm familiar with. Naturally, Märkl is adept at making the necessary connections the score embeds, as the performance Friday night showed. I couldn't help noticing how the spellbinding close of Concertino Cusqueño suggests as it subsides the likewise breathtaking conclusion of the "Largo" in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. (Shostakovich and Britten were friends, and the Russian composer's symphony was among his most effective creative responses to adversity.)
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| Ardent Barber concerto from Paul Huang |
I must end with a last-but-not-least cliche to acknowledge the excellent performance by guest soloist Paul Huang of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, the most beloved American work in its genre. The soloist's entrance is immediate, and I thought Huang's launch, though assured, sounded a tad too restless. It was never out of sync with the orchestra, however, and Huang is a demonstrative performer who clearly connects with every phrase of this concerto. He made the most of the forward momentum.
The second movement features a transcendent tune that must be one of 20th century classical music's most gorgeous melodies (up there with the best of the Russians Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff). Huang gave a heart-melting account of it, richly engaged with its meaning yet stopping short of sentimentality.
The perpetual-motion finale held no terrors for him. In fact, he seemed to enjoy every rapid phrase of it, fleet of finger throughout. He was in an ecstasy of clear articulation and interpretive panache. Not surprisingly, Märkl and the ISO were with him every step of the way. The audience then leapt to its feet in acclaim, and Huang offered a crisp, idiomatic account of Fritz Kreisler's Recitativo and Scherzo, op. 6, as an encore.
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