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The Rapture and the Mystery

New York
Avery Fischer Hall, Lincoln Center
08/19/2011 -  & August 20, 2011
Igor Stravinsky: Symphony in C
Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Concerto Number 4 in G Major, Opus 58

Nelson Freire (Piano)
Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, Louis Langrée (Conductor)


N. Freire (© James McMillan)


Nobody I spoke to amid the packed audience for the third week of the Mostly Mozart Festival can remember hearing Igor Stravinsky’s modestly titled Symphony in C played here, and I confess that I had only heard it on recordings before last night.

There seems no reason for its neglect. The work is a delightful one–and for both historical and musical reasons, one of the “purest” works he ever wrote. After all, during the lengthy time of composition in 1938, he had lost a wife and several close relatives. He had been diagnosed with a possibly fatal clot, and spent much of the time in a sanatorium.

At the same time, Hitler was going full force in his plans to overrun Europe, and Stravsinky, a Russian Francophile, with close times to America, must have been disturbed.

Did this Symphony possess even a scintilla of reference to these personal or international crises? Not only would that be impossible to detect in the music, but the composer–unlike Bartók and Schoenberg–simply brushed off the Second World War as a distraction which prevented him from finishing it in Europe.

Hearing it live for the first time, with conductor Louis Langrée, was an advantage, for he is a most lively very personal conductor who eschewed a smooth classical veneer, and let the orchestra spring into action. While the strings kept murmuring their moto perpetuo measures, the orchestra had some super First Chair players in those most difficult solos. The oboe figurations in the second movement resonated well, the trumpet and trombone divertimento behind the music in the Allegretto were great fun–and Mr. Langrée punched the different rhythms together as if they were simple 4/4 meters.

On recordings, an orchestra for this piece can sound almost stodgy, for Stravinsky never hesitated in doubling contrapuntal lines, creating little fugues in the most unlikely places and using his orchestra the way Picasso used colors. But the conductor here retained the energy, he allowed near clarity (some sections of the third movement were rather brusque) and gave it so much volition that those last very mysterious measures of the lowest growling brass came as a jolt.


Pianist Nelson Freire makes too few appearances in New York these days. The sixty-something Brazilian pianist, who studied in Vienna and now lives in Paris, is a piano patrician, and he gave a most elegant reading of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. That work, with its “Let us begin” opening measures, can rarely go wrong, but the pianist and orchestra didn’t always synch. The soloist had no problems in the first movement (his cadenza was rapturous), and the second movement rhapsody on the piano contrasted with the whiplash orchestra. The last movement was played exquisitely–but very very quickly–by the soloist, and the conductor took special pains to keep up.

It made one feel that we need Mr. Freire to return here for a solo recital, where he won’t have to worry about an orchestra which doesn’t quite fit in with his own immaculate conceptions.



Harry Rolnick

 

 

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