Despite Discord, Philadelphia Is in Tune With Its Maestro

On the whole, he'd rather not be in Philadelphia, but while he is, Christoph Eschenbach is garnering critical acclaim. (By Chris Lee)

All right, they may not like each other much, but Christoph Eschenbach and the Philadelphia Orchestra sure do make glorious music together, as they proved once again Sunday afternoon at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

For those just joining us here, a brief recap may be in order. Last October, after only three years on the job, Eschenbach announced that he would step down as Philadelphia's music director at the end of the 2007-2008 season, making his projected tenure by far the shortest in the orchestra's modern history.

The partnership was ill-fated from the start. The orchestra had wanted Sir Simon Rattle, who elected to take the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic instead. Eschenbach was engaged by a management team that was deeply unpopular with the musicians, and some players felt they had not been properly consulted before his appointment. Such a peremptory move is begging for disaster (many of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's initial objections about its incoming music director, Marin Alsop, stemmed from the same sort of treatment), and Eschenbach's time in Philadelphia has been an unrelentingly stormy one.

And yet Sunday's concert presented Washington with some of the most satisfying orchestral playing it has heard since -- well, since the last time Eschenbach and his group came to town.

There's no law that says that collaborative musicians have to be great pals. Gilbert didn't much like Sullivan, and Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Scotto, the most popular operatic duo in America during the late 1970s, barely spoke to each other when they weren't making tuneful love onstage. But it is hard to think of another conductor-orchestra relationship that has been so fraught with discord and yet remained so musically healthy. (When Berlin turned on Herbert von Karajan, or Boston on Seiji Ozawa, or New York on Zubin Mehta, the concerts suffered mightily.)

The great performance of the afternoon was the one that closed it. The Symphony No. 1 by Johannes Brahms might just be the most overplayed piece in the repertory, but a rendition such as the one presented on Sunday serves to remind a listener why it became so popular in the first place. Like Tchaikovsky in the Piano Concerto No. 1, Brahms leads with his best material, and the marvelously wrought anxiety attack that sets the symphony into motion was realized with a paradoxical mixture of ultra-refined string sonorities and an unfettered dramatic intensity that surged like lava.

It's been said that one test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time. Throughout the symphony, Eschenbach placed an emphasis on space and grandeur, and yet there was never a want of moment-to-moment continuity. The playing was both mighty and elegant, sweeping in its scope, tender in its attention to detail.

The first half of the program was an odd mix. Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 1, written when the composer was caught between traditional and modernist harmonic worlds, is a laborious chromatic straining for 15 instruments, much easier to admire than to like. And it might be argued that Franz Schubert's songs are best heard in their original arrangements for piano and singer. Still, when you have an artist so extraordinarily sensitive as Matthias Goerne, with his meticulously calibrated baritone voice and seemingly infinite command of emotional shading, willing to take on orchestrations by Brahms, Anton Webern, Max Reger and others, you put your reservations aside and listen with gratitude.

The concert was presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society.