I used to bristle at the presence of such “classics light” pieces, wanting every concert to be a special event, intellectually challenging and artistically fulfilling. I was wrong. Sometimes it’s the war horses and the light works that loosen up an orchestra and let it show itself at its best. Jarvi, an eminent conductor with a huge discography and a long title of music directorships behind him, is the second consecutive big-name conductor who’s come to the NSO with a program of more or less traditional works — following Kurt Masur’s all-German program last week — and gotten some very good results.
The concert as a whole juxtaposed sheer prettiness with anguish, sometimes in the same piece: Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, which concluded the program, wrestles with despair and sends shadows scudding across even its brighter moments. Its first half set out to please the crowd: The Glazunov was followed by one of the biggest war horses in the repertory, the thudding draft beast of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto.
Pairing Yefim Bronfman with Jarvi seemed to reflect the kind of veiled nationalism still so prevalent in orchestra programming: Two former Soviet but not-actually-Russian artists (Bronfman was born in Uzbekistan and emigrated to Israel as a young teen) in an all-Russian program. Bronfman, indeed, has been consistently pushed toward the Russian repertoire by labels and presenters throughout his career, though he’s temperamentally less a flashy virtuoso than a thoughtful polymath who just happens to have formidable technique. He’s also an eminently amiable artist and a good sport, and that was how he approached this concerto, as if obligingly setting out to make the best of the assignment.
Bronfman can certainly play the daylights out of this piece. Yet he seemed to be constantly striving to find more in it than mere bombast, right from the start. When the piano first took over the main theme in the first movement, Bronfman — rather than thundering out the phrases — found in them a whole range of colors and moments of actual delicacy.
If there was a hitch, it was that this ultra-sensitive reading was a little at odds with Jarvi’s more robust, straightfoward, even bombastic approach. Jarvi wasn’t wrong, either, but there were moments, particularly in the second movement, when the piano’s shining gentleness was sharply contrasted with the brassiness of the orchestra. Bronfman finally let it all hang out at the end of the piece with a finger-busting demonstration of technique, and responded to the audience’s thunderous ovation with an equally difficult encore, one of Liszt’s arrangements of a Paganini Caprice.
Jarvi is a generous musician, and a big one, but not a tragic one. He offered, then, a healthy reading of Prokofiev’s Sixth that communicated the piece’s darkness without letting it lapse into the terrain of real danger (somewhat in contrast to Valery Gergiev, who played the piece here with the London Symphony in 2009). He, like Masur, seemed to get the orchestra to respond. Although there were muddled moments from the first violins throughout the evening, the horn solo here sounded terrific, and the big, swollen, infected chords that start the second movement, prickling with cymbals, were pregnant as approaching rain.
The third movement offers an extended dialogue that keeps being picked up by contrasting instruments, the tubas commenting on the winds before passing the oom-pah role to the cellos. It’s a kind of near-comic moment that Jarvi brought off with dignity.
The program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8.
Loading...
Comments