A few years ago the Seattle Symphony Orchestra began to vary the nature of its conventional concert format with residencies of noted musicians, sometimes a conductor, sometimes a soloist. Instead of one program performed several times in a week, there are several programs spread over a couple of weeks. They have been, in the main, a success.
This week the noted American conductor, Dennis Russell Davies, who has made his career mostly in Europe, is spending some time in Seattle. He is not the first musician, not to mention choreographers and designers, who have found European soil, particularly Germany and France, conducive to their creativity. Although Davies has spent time in New York and California and St Paul, the bulk of his career has been in Germany and Austria, leading orchestras in Stuttgart, Vienna, Bonn, Basel and Saarbrucken. He is currently music director and chief conductor of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and Linz Opera in Austria and the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland.
His repertory is broad, with plenty of the canon in his repertory. But he is also known for his commitment to music of the past century and the present one. His program Thursday is a good example. He began with Schumann’s Fourth Symphony — a place where most conductors conclude their programs — and continued with a piano concerto by Alan Hovhaness and the suite from Bartok’s ballet score “The Miraculous Mandarin.”
The Schumann was least successful reading of the evening, the Hovhaness the most idiosyncratic and the Bartok, the most forceful.
It is easy to think of Schumann’s symphonies as old friends — dependable and welcome but not always so dynamic. That is the case when performances slip into the routine or simply lack imagination. Davies’ account of the score was stolid, dull and unyielding. There was almost no dynamic variation and the most wondrous of melodies fell lifeless onto the stage. It was rhythmically inert, something I would not has expected from Davies who has given other scores remarkable life. Alas.
Scored for piano and strings, the Hovhaness concerto, “Lousadzak” (“The Coming of Light”), came early in the composer’s long career It was premiered in 1945 in Boston, with Hovhaness as the soloist. Maki Namekawa, who often collaborates with Davies, was the soloist. The Hovhaness idiom, unlike no other 20th-century composer, was readily grasped by Namekawa, which is to her credit. She invested her considerable technique and interpretative facility to the effort. Even with that, the piece fell rather flat. It is repetitive and never seemed to go anywhere in particular, at least to my ears.
“The Miraculous Mandarin” has a fascinating history. Because of its lurid subject matter, the one-act ballet was banned in the early days. Eventually it found its way onto the main stages of Europe with many different productions, a record for the time. It was done at New York City Ballet in 1951. Only a couple of years ago Donald Byrd, artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theatre in Seattle, produced the ballet with his own choreography at the Moore Theatre. Needless to say, there was no Seattle Symphony in the pit. The alternative was a chamber ensemble of unusual scoring.
Say what one will about the libretto, it is dramatic and powerful. So is Bartok’s music. Davies gave the piece its full due on Thursday. The music-making was decisive, full of color and had unquestioned authority. One can only dream of hearing such a musical presence accompanying the dance.
Tickets for the remaining performances of the “Miraculous Mandarin” and “Lousadzak” can be purchased at www.seattlesymphony.org. Be sure to read Zach Carstensen’s take on Thursday’s performance here.
Gathering Note 