Sweet rather than savage Stravinsky? Rite on
BY ARTHUR KAPTAINIS, THE GAZETTE January 15, 2009
One mega-masterpiece per program, please. That is the usual MSO philosophy in Place des Arts. This week, Kent Nagano defiantly coupled Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring with Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, the former representing the birth of a new era and the latter a farewell to the old.
The Rite was also a signature work of the Dutoit years, so there was much curiosity surrounding the first Nagano performance on Tuesday. It lasted the usual 35 minutes, but sounded longer because so many new details emerged from the complex score.
Some were the result of podium-directed affirmative action, as in the Procession of the Sage, where Nagano toned down the blaring horns in favour of rhythmic lower-string figurations that normally inhabit the background. Perhaps such reversals, in a work this familiar, are natural. Fine, we know about the horns. Let us hear the strings.
What the abundance of detail could not guarantee, and might actually have obscured, was the animal thrust of the piece. Would Stravinsky have reiterated his complaint about the Karajan recording - "a pet savage rather than a real one" - had he been present?
Dutoit also was thought by some to be less interested in raw rhythm than elegance, but no one could doubt the cinematic sweep of his interpretation. Nagano asked us to hear the score less imagistically and more analytically.
Anyway, I was willing to cooperate. The virtuosity of the orchestra helped. The MSO of 2009 is a beautiful and disciplined ensemble of spirited newcomers and veterans who remain at the top of their game.
This was apparent also in Das Lied, which was being recorded. Surely this iridescent score is Mahler's most MSO-ish. Nagano oversaw a delicate performance that combined the lustre of orchestral sonority with the intimacy of chamber music. The lucid oboe solos of Ted Baskin were notable among the many fine individual contributions.
Between the vocalists, baritone Christian Gerhaher, a Lieder specialist, was in charge of the sad evocations of faraway beauty and tenor Stuart Skelton, a more operatic type, handled the robust drinking songs. He had another chance to get the opening number right last night.
This rather long program began with Tan Dun's 17-minute Orchestral Theatre I. Starting with rhythms and shouts reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein's Mambo, the piece was mostly about exotic fits and starts. Nothing special here, apart from an attempt to draw an Asian sound from the low range of the piccolo. Virginia Spicer performed the trick splendidly.
A pre-concert reminder to the audience that the Mahler was being recorded did nothing to suppress multiple coughs in quiet passages. My theory: Such announcements increase the coughing.
akaptainis@sympatico.ca
