CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
This is not to take anything away from Koussevitzky, who rightfully occupies a special place as godfather of many important 20th-century scores, most of which would probably never have been written if he hadn’t commissioned them. But most of today’s maestro (to say nothing of recording companies and orchestra managers) are far more interested in serving up the Tchaikovsky Sixth for the hundredth time than in learning a new score–even though it’s probably accurate to say that no really new interpretive ideas about the Sixth have surfaced since Toscanini.
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Not that the pieces are at fault; what has been lacking are conductors with some basic understanding of what Haydn and 18th-century music are all about. At least as far as their recent performances are concerned, Slatkin and Tilson Thomas are typical offenders. Slatkin’s rendering of the Haydn Symphony no. 66 in B-flat Major (a CSO premiere) was flabby and lifeless, and the winds were swimming in an abundance of large, undefined string sound. Sloppy ensembling and slow tempi abounded. Tilson Thomas’s account of the Haydn Symphony no. 81 in G Major (also a CSO premiere) descended even further into the depths: section homogeneity was so poor that the sound often produced the effect of a Gabrieli antiphon, the violins usually echoing the cellos. Was this avant-garde Haydn? If so, it also dictates that repeated sections all sound exactly the same, with no dynamic contrast whatsoever.
In light of all the recent revolutionary scholarship into 18th-century music in general and Haydn in particular, a pressing question emerges: why are two of America’s brightest young conductors totally unaware of it? An even more pressing question is why CSO management continues to seek out such hack Haydn conductors when they could bring in, probably for less money, any number of people–Christopher Hogwood, Trevor Pinnock, Anthony Newman, to name just a few–who could do a far more stylish job. Or if one wants to take a more contemporary approach, bring in a George Cleve or someone who can keep sections together, properly balanced, and perhaps even serve up some imagination with the music.
The two Slatkin weeks each contained a new work, the first a violin concerto composed for Mark Peskanov by Juilliard professor Stanley Wolfe. I admire Peskanov for wanting his Chicago debut to be also a Chicago premiere, but the Wolfe concerto is so riddled with Romantic cliches that it could have been the score for a B movie some 40 or 50 years ago. Jascha Heifetz used to sometimes commission similarly shallow works, using them to showcase his large, beautiful sound–a sound unfortunately quite lacking in young Peskanov. This piece is representative of current CSO management’s occasional shortsightedness as to what constitutes a “new” work; composers such as Wolfe and George Lloyd may be living, but they are not, in any stylistic sense, writing new music.
The later Bartok was represented by Romanian Folkdances, seven enormously clever and entertaining piano pieces that Bartok arranged for orchestra because they were so accessible and popular. Despite their intended commercial appeal, they are charming settings, and Slatkin handled them well, always evoking the proper mood and setting.
What is so fascinating about Ives and Bartok is that, even though they ended up in completely different universes of sound, they came to them in a similar manner–by attempting to solve the musical-language crisis of the 20th century by fusing the European tradition with their own national traditions, Hungarian and American respectively. The result, in both cases, is a startling originality that still stands head and shoulders above most of the century’s dead-end experiments in sound and half-solutions to the musical-language crisis, which is still with us today.
