Ben Zander and the Boston Philharmonic do Beethoven and Shostakovich
Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix, February 27, 2003
Posted: 2003-02-27 10:44:06
THIS PAST WEEKEND, Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic also gave us Britten and Shostakovich. The Four Sea Interludes are more usually than not performed with another orchestral passage from Peter Grimes - a roiling Passacaglia depicting the psychological turmoil of Britten's doomed fisherman. Zander said in his pre-concert talk that he had in mind a program about "the individual in conflict with society." Starting from violist Stephen King's eloquent solo, the Britten built inexorably to the point of the misunderstood outcast Grimes's madness.
The program ended with a stunning performance of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, the work he began shortly after the death of Stalin, who'd declared the composer an enemy of society. And the kind of dramatic shaping Zander gave the seven-minute Passacaglia he also gave the 50-minute symphony.
Maybe it takes a Mahler conductor to know how to pace Shostakovich's extended orchestral works. The Tenth actually quotes a passage from the Urlicht of Mahler's Symphony No. 2: "Man is in the greatest need. Man is in the greatest pain." Of course, clarinettist Thomas Hill played this with great poignance - because he's played in Zander's Mahler. Zander and Hill made it an event. And the long first movement was a series of such events. Kathleen Boyd's flute had another Mahlerian moment, playing Shostakovich's Viennese waltz-gone-nightmare.
With most conductors the crashing climax in this movement comes too early; the symphony screams at you, badgers you. Zander paced the movement perfectly. Shostakovich needs restraint more than overstatement - it's already overemphatic enough, but the material is not as rich or as complex as Mahler's. Zander found just the right temperature. I've never heard this movement work better.
Or the whole symphony. Zander took both the short second movement (possibly a ferociously satirical portrait of Stalin) and the finale at the exhilarating but "impossible" speed Shostakovich requests. Turns out it's not impossible. And it's breathtaking. The Scherzo, with some magnificent horn playing (it's got 11 horn calls), suggested another Mahlerian contrast - the pull between the Earthly and the Beyond (those outer-spacy last bars). And in oboist Peggy Pearson's great solo during the slow introduction to the last movement, all the conflicting emotions in the symphony (anger, pain, lament, forgiveness) came together and so made a resolution possible - a resolution in the insistent repetition of the musical notes that in their German names spell out Dmitri Shostakovich's (German) initials (DSCH), an assertion of ego that's both moving and offputting.
In between the Dionysian intensities of the Britten and Shostakovich, Zander offered a kind of Apollonian mediation, Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, with its short slow middle movement in which peace, the power of music, subdues the forces of aggression. Liszt is said to have compared it to Orpheus calming the wild beasts; Zander compared it to Saddam Hussein handing over his powers to Gandhi. He got the orchestra to play with plenty of "attitude" - implacable in contrast to pianist John O'Conor's touching tenderness.
I've always admired O'Conor's playing, and it was good to have him back in Boston. He makes a lovely, sometimes even radiant sound. And he clearly understands the music. The teasing exchanges between the keyboard and the orchestra in the finale were a particular delight. But in the first movement, some of the runs didn't "sound" consistently, and technical slip-ups are hard to get away with in this concerto. As has often been my experience with O'Conor, he's good enough to make me want even more, but that extra leap from the excellent into the profound rarely occurs. We should be grateful for the excellence, yet we come so close to something so much better that its absence is frustrating. Still, the entire concert, with the orchestra at its very best and some remarkably timely issues - was profoundly satisfying.
