Friday March 2, 2007 SGN.org |
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Volume 35 Issue 09 |
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Friday, Jan 09, 2009
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Old Fashioned Brahms in Modern Disney Hall |
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| Old Fashioned Brahms in Modern Disney Hall | ||
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by Rod Parke -
SGN A&E Writer The Los Angeles Philharmonic presented all four of Brahms' symphonies recently at Disney Hall. My partner and I eagerly sought this opportunity to return to Disney, having experienced the excellent acoustics of this wonderful hall last year. We liked what we heard from the LA Phil then, and we had every reason to expect similar delights this time, especially since the conductor was again Christoph von Dohnanyi. We were able to schedule the program of the first and third symphonies. If we had heard this concert twenty-five years ago, I would have called it an unalloyed triumph. This was Brahms of the heavy, Germanic school. There was plenty of energy and articulation, but the texture was dark, super-warm, and just a little lugubrious. There was drama but nothing startling or unexpected. All the required elements were well in place. Phrases all had direction, and the dynamics were smoothly handled. The sonorities were weighty and serious, with no shafts of light to relieve the dark, heavy orchestration. Most solo instruments were doubled, adding heft to everything. Brahms might have liked it. I too liked it, but more modern approaches to Brahms have also excited me more. A couple seasons ago, Lorin Maazel conducted the Bavarian Radio Symphony in Brahms' Symphony #1 in a Seattle concert I called "Shocking Brahms." It was a hair-raising, hold-on-to-your-seat experience, showing me vitality in the composer I had previously missed. Likewise, the John Eliot Gardner recording of the "German Requiem" is a revelation that sheds all kinds of light on the work without robbing it of one ounce of beauty and poetry. It shows me that I can enjoy Brahms without bathing in a black-strap molasses of gooey sentiment. The orchestration is clear and exciting, cleansed of muddiness. I had hoped that the clarity of the Disney acoustics would work similar wonders for Brahms' dark and at times syrupy sounds. And this magic was indeed evident. One could easily discern the contrabassoon, usually hidden in dark partnership with the celli and double basses. And the interplay between the first and second violins was fun. But the upward-masking of the lower instruments for the most part swamped the texture so that the inner voices were often hard to distinguish. The super dramatic clarity of a Maazel or Gardiner was nowhere to be found. Part of what makes me prefer the more modern approach to Brahms is an awareness that he began his professional career playing in whorehouses, with whose primary employees he remained on the most intimate terms most of his life. This fact belies a livelier person than my earlier experience with his music seemed to reveal. He was also a prickly person socially, delighting in offending almost everyone at social gatherings. Am I wrong, then, in looking for a little more edge and in-your-face attitude in his music? I certainly find that in the Maazel and Gardiner approach. |
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