Last Updated: May 31, 2000
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One of five winning entries by Justin Davidson of Newsday, Melville,
N.Y. that won the criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE Distinguished
Writing Awards.
Monday. March 10, 1997
THE VIENNA PHILHARMONIC could undoubtedly play Beethoven's Fifth and
Sixth symphonies without a conductor, probably without sheet music, and
possibly without sleep. You could shake the orchestra's members awake at
4 a.m. and convene a concert on the spot, and what you got would probably
sound much the way it did on Friday: sleek, unblemished and lustrous.
This is an orchestra as finely calibrated and precision-tuned as any
piece of million-dollar machinery. It has as many moving parts as there
are notes in a score, and rarely does one malfunction. The chords all balance
impeccably, the pizzicatos are always in synch. The third bassoonist knows
his place in the music's hierarchy, waits patiently for 70 measures and
then can judge exactly how loud, long and incisive his solitary "dup" should
be.
So what do all these highly proficient specialists need a conductor
for? In the case of Daniel Barenboim, not much. Barenboim did not lead
the performance so much as chair the proceedings, nodding at players who
didn't need to be cued and then watching benevolently as they did their
thing. The result was highly competent and completely generic: an interpretation
arrived at by committee. Details that might have been bristles of energy
were slicked down instead, leaving the performance glabrous and undifferentiated.
Wherever the music called for an interpretive decision, the musicians opted
for the obvious one, and the conductor did not override them. It would
have been up to him to shake the orchestra out of its buttoned-down professionalism
and remind everyone concerned that Beethoven's music can still sound revolutionary,
shocking and violent, but Barenboim seemed to have no interest in doing
so.
The expensive sound of the Vienna Philharmonic is one of the world's
great luxuries, like the oil-and-leather smell inside a Jaguar. But Beethoven,
in particular, might be livid to know that his music had been turned into
just another of these sedate and civilized pleasures, or that he was part
of a tradition thus preserved in aspic. In the Vienna's performance, his
"Pastoral" Sixth Symphony did not evoke nature so much as a bucolic mural
on a cafe wall: The birdsongs smacked of the cuckoo clock, the storm was
a tempest in a beer mug.
In some cases, Barenboim's cavalier conducting vitiated the music's
restless ambiguities and even undermined its structure. Take, for instance,
the famous transition from the third to the fourth movements of Beethoven's
Fifth, in which the timpani quietly beats out the symphony's signature
rhythm as the strings create a harmonic haze, veiling both the downbeat
and the key but exposing an unbearable tension. When the fourth movement
arrives in a loud C-major spasm, it bursts through the scrim like a revelation,
and the moment resolves the previous section even as it begins the next.
Under Barenboim's baton, though, the transition merely purred innocuously
like an idling car, as if biding its time until the fourth movement could
get on its way.
Neither Mozart nor Bruckner fared better on the following night. Mozart's
Symphony No. 29 in A major, K. 201, written when the composer was 18, sounded
positively middle-aged. So, too, did Bruckner's Symphony No. 9, left incomplete
when the composer died at 72, aspiring to a musical transfiguration that
the Vienna burghers denied him.
Bruckner built his cathedral-like musical structure from audible building
blocks - phrases that repeat, climbing the scale in an ever-intensifying
sequence, until they arrive at those brassy climaxes with the power of
a wrecking ball, crumble, and then begin again. In Barenboim's hands, though,
the work proceeded with all the excitement of road construction.
The Vienna Philharmonic is a magnificent ensemble that the right conductor
can ignite, but these concerts showed that it can also suffer from a sort
of plump and clubby complacency - nothing that a few women in its ranks
couldn't cure.
