ClassicalPhilly

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classical Philly, composers, maestros, musicians, watlz

The Philadelphians make it more than holiday pageantry 

Dressed in a short blood -red velvet jacket, conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin was tres debonair raising his glass and waltzing NYE in on the Verizon Hall podium with the Fabulous Philadelphians onstage and in the audience.

Yannick kicked it off with a luminous performance of Strauss’ Overture to Die Fledermaus and Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes (arg. Hermann) both showcases for the command of the Orchestra’s swirling strings. Nezet-Seguin made the evening more than a showcase for his obvious mastery of waltz repertoire. He also camped it up for The ‘Waltzing Cat’ (Anderson) with those meowing strings, playfully clawing at the strings with his maestro paws. Then more bubbly comedy with “the Champagne Waltz” with principal percussionist Christopher Deviney swilling it down and providing sound effects.

The program highlight was Kimberly Fisher’s
Fritz Kreisler violin medley Schon Rosmann/Liebesleid/Liebesfreud. Fisher is the orchestra’s 2nd chair principal and her technical artistry and expressiveness with Kreisler’s music is soulful and simply lustrous.

Yannick clearly enjoys conducting the traditional ‘Vienesse – centric repertory, but the Fritz Kreisler selections, Richard Rogers’ Carousel Waltz and ‘Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from Swan Lake made for a most vibrant second act. finished of course, that panoramic dance over the Blue Danube and the requisite clap songs, but Yannick skipped his usual NYE closer Robert Burns’ Auld Lang Syne, perhaps kicking off the afterparty toasts on Broad St or winging back to New York in time for 2019 on Broadway.

Bramwell Tovey spirited style for Philly holidays

Meanwhile, Philadelphia Orchestra’s most popular guest conductor-composer Bramwell Tovey was also having a robust holiday season in Philly, conducting two separate seasonal programs earlier in December.

The first, Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, with Tovey’s his narrative interludes laced in. “I wouldn’t dignify it with the term narration. What I would say though is that the first time I did it was with an audience of all young people and it seemed to work very well.” Tovey said a few days later in an impromptu interview in his dressing room.

The audience disagreed, this was vibrant Britten with added charm and the perfect prelude to a strong staging and orchestral-choral performance of Giancarlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, though rarely performed is a modern classic and many in this audience still remember seeing it on tv in 1951. It was actually the first opera to have its world premiere on television and was a huge success.

The key role of Amahl, scored for a boy soprano was portrayed by Dante Michael DiMaio, who sings with the Philadelphia Boy Choir and has performed with Opera Philadelphia. 

Tovey said “Young Dante is truly exceptional,” Tovey said. “Amahl is a huge undertaking for a boy soprano. When I arrived, he was already note-perfect playing this role. During rehearsal, I asked him to do a few things and took it in a ran with it, some of it is so high, he handled those high gs.”

The adapted biblical story of a poor widowed mother and her disabled son who take in three travelers while on a religious journey. DiMaio and mezzo-soprano Renee Tatum, as Amahl’s mother, had wonderful vocal chemistry and pathos.

The Philadelphia Symphonic Choir bringing detail and emotional dimension, to the chorale. And the Three Kings- tenor Andrew Stenson (Kaspar), bass-baritone Brandon Cedel (Melchoir) and bass David Leigh (Balthazar)- making the most of their character solos.

It played beautifully on the Verizon Hall stage, not an easy thing to stage opera with the orchestra also onstage. Tovey noted stage director Omera Ben Seadia is the reason why. who moved the large chorus from the choir loft to the stage scenes with ease.

“We literally only had one staging rehearsal.  He was very creative, responsive to the beats and hungry for musical information…and if I suggested leaning on a phrase this way or that, he would do it next time and it would immediately go onto his musical hard drive.”

For his part, Tovey had never conducted the piece.   And a vast majority of the Philadelphia Orchestra had never performed it, though, on both counts, one would never have guessed. This was a triumphant performance of an underappreciated Menotti work.

The following week, Tovey’s revisited the repertory of Philadelphia Orchestra’s number one classical album of all time 1962’s The Glorious Sounds of Christmas.

The highlight of which was Tovey’s narration as he accompanied himself on piano with melodies of carols, jazz riffs, and classical improvisations, while reciting ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, with that sonorous deep voice, delivering magical moments.

As busy as the maestro was during his holidays in Philly, he still had time for a pop-up a concert at Liberty Place shopping tower.  And he popped up to New York in between the programs to perform as guest pianist with the New York Philharmonic. “It’s fun to do it like that. In some ways, it’s easier to conduct it when I’m playing it.” Tovey recalls that  Leonard Bernstein gave him the idea.

Tovey not only cracks audiences up with his relaxed banter on the podium, but he also has the vocal prowess of a veteran British actor. For the second program with the Philadelphians is now becoming a semi-annual performance by Tovey of a recreation of conductor Eugene Ormandy’s 1964 concert The Glorious Sounds of Christmas’ that became a bestselling album across the charts recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1964.
“Something I really enjoy doing with the Philadelphia Orchestra,” the maestro intimated.

He narrates the  ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’ Tovey’s golden baritone is as warm as a holiday fire, but he also draws more laughs with his witty asides on audience members arriving late, musical jokes about the orchestra or even slinging sharp political barbs.  He is the drollest maestro on the international circuit, but in the end, it is all about the music and his creative relationship with the musicians wherever he conducts.  

Tovey is now conductor emeritus of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, recently stepping down after his 18-year tenure as musical director-conductor. The maestro is by no means slowing down; he has been named the musical director of BBC Symphony Orchestra. Artistic advisor of the Rhode Island Philharmonic and musical Director of Calgary Opera. He has a slate of new projects lined up, including plans to premiere his new opera.

Classical Philly

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classical Philly

Phil Orch’s 40/40 Project

Conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin is programming compositions that haven’t been played by the Philadelphia Orchestra for many years. His ‘40/40 Project’ of works that are not in heavy concert rotation, is resulting in compelling program mixes. In October, his Russian program illustrated what this idea is really about, how Nezet-Seguin illustrates musical connections and threads living musical legacies, in this case works by Russian composers Alexander Glazunov, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Aram Khachaturian.

Alexander Glazunov’s ‘The Season’ and Rachmaninoff’s ‘Symphony no. 1’ were composed within a few years of each other in the late 1890s and the third work Khachaturian‘s Piano Concerto premiered in 1936. All huge, bombastic works with wildly different styles, but deeply embedded Russian musical DNA.

The Rachmaninoff Symphony disappeared after its disastrous premiere with Glazunov conducting. Among other mishaps, it was under-rehearsed. Afterward Rachmaninoff suffered a near nervous breakdown and the piece was not played again until 1945 and finally recognized as a masterwork of Russian repertoire. Khachaturian’s concerto suffered a similar premiere disaster in 1936, but much exalted in later performances.

The concert began with Glazunov’s The Seasons a ballet score and by now concert showpiece with glittering surfaces, but the orchestral sub-streams are just as compelling, and that salon waltz gliding in unexpected, in contrast to lead string phalanx spiking through Verizon Hall.

Jean -Yves Thibaudet bounded onstage, collar on his Vivian Westwood up, and game face on to tackle Khachaturian Piano Concerto, a signature work for Canadian pianist. Thibaudet instantly locked into the intense orchestral drama and his piano interplay was commanding from the start. Khachaturian develops is a fiery exchange between piano and orchestra, not a polite concerti dialogue. At times the piano is the percussive drive in this piece. Thribaudet was a man musically possessed with every line detail charging through mach speed keyboard runs punctuated with chromatic density that he kept translucent. Khatchaturian’s Georgian folkloric markers instructively accented by Nezet Seguin. Among the other standout soloist’s Peter Smith’s penetrating oboe line that gives way to the richest sonorities in the cellos.

Rachmaninoff Symphony no. 1 was the well chosen closer and stood up to the other pieces in robustness as a composition and as played, starting with the foreboding symphonic entrance, the orchestra’s brass retooling the acoustics. Rachmaninoff had a vibrant relationship with the Philadelphians and YNS pays homage to this legacy in his altogether vivid performance.

Later in the month, Russian maestro Vladimir Jurowski, principal conductor at London Philharmonic, is also a marquee draw when he guest conducts with the Philadelphians, where he typically elicits a distinct symphonic thrust from the players, which admirably, has nothing to do with volume.

Jurowski is fun to watch he stands bolt upright, with very centered physicality and his minimal moves are hynotic, and more important, you pick of the synergy between the maestro and the musicians. He is reflective of the musical mili-second. He also shows range. This program was book-ended by two sonic works- contemporary British composer Julian Anderson’s classical-jazz symphonics of Stations of the Sun and the metaphysics of Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra in its totality. In between, there was the crystalline classicism of Mozart.

Anderson’s Stations contemplates the seasons and the attendant human rituals in observing them. It is a time-lapse tone poem that keeps building in front of our ears. It opens with an upper and lower string pizzicato prologue that intensifies to a ping-ponging sound matrix, enter swirling woodwinds, then Japanese temple bells that cue percussive anarchy with sounds of ratchets, claps, gongs, tubular bells, xylophone, tom-tom and hidden bongo cool polyrhythm . The cross – current orchestral careens intriguingly into jazz symphonia, more Ellingtonian than Gershwinesque, Anderson makes the cross genres cinematic and earthy.

Next, Alina Ibragimova played Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 4 next to Jurowski off the podium encircled by two-dozen musicians for a plush chamber orchestra – size reading. Smart, unfussy conservatoire reading on the Allegro, and in the second movement, Ibragimova with so much line polish and interplay with the other musicians, easily showing interpretive mastery in the solo sections.

From Elvis fans to 200l: A Space Odyssey aficionados everyone knows Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathuthra’ ‘Dawn’ entrance, but there is a lot of music that comes after and Jurowski essays its full, if less dramatically sonic dimension. Also a tone poem in continuous segments- ‘Great Longing, Joys and Passions, Grave Song, etc. this is an epic symphonic arc.

Jurowski put his stamp on the famous opening not letting the organ rumble bottom out as the lingering sound concussive statement, he tightening the tension between the brass and strings. The crescendo is punched through the hall, thrillingly and the pick up of the thread had its own musical physics. Strauss’ structure The folkloric tone poems in the work bloom, with the ‘Dance Song’ another waltz time mise-en-scene appearing magically, David Kim’s lead violin lines just one of many thrilling performances by individual musicians in this piece.