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Lorin
Maazel brings the splendid New York Philharmonic to the OC |
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NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
LORIN MAAZEL, Conductor Performance at the Renee and
Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall,
It therefore begs the question. Is Maazel exerting too much micro-control on his musicians at the expense of their musical freedom? By all accounts, his predecessor, Kurt Masur, was a similar control freak, and a hot-tempered one at that. The main difference is that these same musicians slavishly respond to the new Maestro who is urbane, affable and a gifted communicator (who speaks six languages fluently) and, for better or worse, a consummate manipulator -- everything that Mr. Masur was not. In the “Eroica” Symphony, for example, he was able to bring out the nuances of rhythm and orchestration that have eluded many interpreters of this work. Ultimately, a Beethoven symphony is more than the sum of its parts. The myopic builder focuses on the gilded moldings and trimming too much, losing sight of the overall architectural plan. Despite having made many salient points, the performance of the “Eroica” as a whole ultimately failed to convince. In Dvorak’s “Carnival Overture”, Wagner’s overture to “Meistersinger von Nurmberg”, and Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne Suite” – short works that are architecturally less rigorous – Maazel’s conducting was totally confident and compelling. The sounds of the New York Philharmonic were a joy in every section, but particularly in the glorious strings and winds. These musicians are so well trained that they can, in Leonard Bernstein’s words, “switch on a dime to whichever style, be it German, French or Russian, better than most European orchestras” – as these two concerts amply demonstrated. This is truly a great American orchestra. These concerts also put the new Renee and Henry
Segerstrom Concert Hall’s acoustics to the test, with mixed
results. In my initial assessment on
September 15, the sound was full,
clear and perfectly balanced as heard from my orchestra seat. This
time, my Box Circle seat was directly below an overhang and the
sound was top-heavy and bass-deficient. Normally, it will take some
time for a new concert hall to ‘break in’ acoustically. Given the
full performance schedule for the coming months, there will be a lot
of opportunities for tweaking and fine-tuning in the hall.
Truman C. Wang is editor-in-chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, the Pasadena Star-News and other Southern California publications. |
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In
two days of colorful programming, Maazel unleashed a phantasmagoric
range of sounds from his New York orchestra – the chilling precision
of the strings in Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta”, the meltingly
beautiful oboe in the funeral march of Beethoven’s “Eroica”
Symphony, the shimmering, gossamer-layered textures of Ravel’s
“Rhapsodie espagnole”. Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique” was given
a carefully crafted, perhaps overly mannered, reading where every
cymbal crash, trumpet blast, and every wild opium-induced flight of
fantasy seemed calculated. Nonetheless, it was a viscerally
exciting performance, just not a musically very satisfying one.
Similarly, Brahms’ “Haydn Variations” suffered from a lack of
imagination running through its eight diverse variations. 