Good Evening!
Tonight's concert at Carnegie Hall was good, but also quite interesting for a number of reasons. This was the last concert in the "Spring For Music" series. Any orchestra that was interested in being invited to Carnegie Hall for this series was asked to submit a program, and the orchestras were selected based on the programming. The programs over the past two weeks had a theme: dance rhythms, mythology, poetry, etc. Tonight's theme was "symphony" - or at least the evolution of the symphony. However, Maestro Nagano went back to the root of the word symphony, and he presented a program of various ways notes sound - either in unison or in "reaction" to each other. Well...
The first half of the program consisted of orchestral works by Gabrieli, Webern and Stravinsky, interspersed with solo keyboard works of J.S. Bach. The whole "symphony" theme seemed a bit stretched, but the playing of the orchestra was quite good. Alas, the piano soloist's approach to Bach was a bit too improvisatory for my taste. There were places where it almost sounded like she had take all sense of rhythm and beat out of the pieces.
The second half consisted of one work: Beethoven's Symphony No. 5. It's a true chestnut of the repertoire, but the Maestro seemed to be on a mission to un-cliché it. There were some interesting tempo choices, and change of tempo choices. And just when you thought the piece couldn't go any faster in a section, well... A thrilling if somewhat puzzling interpretation.
Thankfully, they ended up playing two encores. The first was Fauré's "Sicilienne" from "Pelleas et Melissande" - which was taken at a nice clip too. The second was a bit of Berlioz, "Le Corsair", and that was truly some of the best playing of the evening. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra made a name for themselves playing Berlioz under their previous Musical Director, Charles Dutoit, and it was nice to hear some of that "old school" sound and mentality to close out the evening.