Gergiev and Mariinsky orchestra start season
Carnegie Hall opened its season with an orchestra from out of town—way out of town: St. Petersburg (and not Florida). This was the Mariinsky Orchestra, known during Soviet times as the Kirov. Carnegie Hall will feature other orchestras from abroad this season: the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics, most promisingly. It will also host the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra. There’s a curveball.
Conductor Valery Gergiev, who led the Mariinsky Orchestra at Carngie Hall’s opening night. Photo by Joachim Ladefoged
There will be domestic orchestras, too, including ensembles from Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cleveland and San Francisco. In 2003, there was a deal between Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic to move the Philharmonic back into Carnegie, where it had once resided. A lot of us said, “But will other orchestras be crowded out? Will Carnegie retain its ability to be a showcase for orchestras at large?” In any case, the deal fell through.
Conducting the Mariinsky on opening night was its regular maestro, the famed, talented and hard-working Valery Gergiev. He is also the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. The hall was decked out with attractive fall bouquets. Gergiev used no podium, having his feet flat on the floor, and no baton. These are his usual practices. We also saw his habitual “Furtwängler flutter”—those mysterious movements of the hands. Apparently, orchestras respond to them, as they did when Furtwängler fluttered.
This was to be a short program, with an early start and an early finish—7 to 8:30, no intermission. It lasted well beyond that, in part because Gergiev did not take the stage till about 7:15. The concert turned out to feel a little long, in my judgment.
The New York Philharmonic kicks off its season with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and so does the Metropolitan Opera. Not so Carnegie Hall. This program started with Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, one of the most delightful and exuberant pieces in the literature. It was written in 1954 for the 37th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik regime, of course, killed approximately 20 million human beings. But we can forget that while grinning to the Festive Overture.
It begins with a fanfare that always reminds me of halftime at a football game: “Band, take the field!” It proceeds with zippy merriment. Gergiev and the Mariinsky performed the overture ably. It can be faster and nimbler, but Gergiev gave it the appropriate charge. The audience’s applause was very brief. In fact, Gergiev came out for a curtain call, only to find that there was no applause. He stopped in his tracks, smiled bravely and bowed. It was one of the most awkward moments I have ever seen at a concert.
Seconds into the overture, I was reminded of the extraordinary acoustics of this hall. This happens to me every year on opening night. I leave Carnegie Hall in May, as we all do, and am in other halls for the next four months. These halls aren’t bad, just ordinary. Then I return to Carnegie in October and am floored once more. Very quickly, I get used to it—though we should probably not take these acoustics for granted.
The next piece on the Mariinsky program was Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, which needs a cello soloist. He was Yo-Yo Ma, probably the most popular cellist in the world. Even casual TV watchers are familiar with him. I know a cellist who thanks Ma every time he sees him. Why? Because Ma, he says, opened avenues for other cellists, getting audiences used to the idea of a solo cellist.
Ma brought to the Tchaikovsky his usual enthusiasm. At his best, he played with loose flair. At his worst, he was just loose—loose and sloppy. His finest moment was probably the haunting D-minor variation that precedes the finale. In the finale—that joyous, irresistible thing—he seemed to lose his sound, his very volume. Curious.
As he plays, Ma smiles, gesticulates, flirts with the orchestra and generally hams it up. This is harmless, if sometimes a little hard to watch. If the man is sincere, who can begrudge him? Still, I couldn’t help thinking, a little meanly, “If Starker had acted like this onstage, would he have been more famous and richer than he was?”
Without really being asked, Ma played an encore—that is, he sat down to it at the earliest opportunity, before the audience could stop applauding. It was one of his usual encores: an arrangement of the beloved Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1. I once heard him play this piece exquisitely—with no soupiness, only taste. He simply let Tchaikovsky’s line be itself. Such was not the case on this occasion. He applied a vat of soup, and allowed his pitch to sag. The piece was slow, self-indulgent and almost dull. Frankly, Ma’s encore put a damper on the evening, which had been moving along fairly well.
It got worse with Scheherazade, the final piece on the printed program. Gergiev loves this Rimsky-Korsakov hit, and rightly so. He told me in an interview years ago that Scheherazade was one of the pieces that hooked him on music. But he did not do his best job with it at Carnegie Hall. The piece started with a fumble and remained sloppy. The pizzicatos, for example, were a mess. There were some stirring moments, for Gergiev has too much musicality to lay a complete egg. But there were too many longueurs—longueurs that were not the composer’s fault.
As quickly as he could, Gergiev offered an encore, and it was the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Here at last was music-making, real music-making. The piece was idiomatic, rousing and just right. So, at something like 9 o’clock, you could leave with a smile on your face.
Gergiev and his Mariinsky Orchestra stayed in residence at Carnegie Hall, for a series of concerts centered on Tchaikovsky. The concerts included all six symphonies. Carnegie is celebrating its 120th anniversary, and Tchaikovsky conducted at the hall’s very first concert. So, that composer is being fêted today. Back in 2007, Lorin Maazel, then the New York Philharmonic’s music director, put on a Tchaikovsky festival. This did not sit well with many critics: Why was Maazel, that fossil, wasting time on that melodizing fossil of a composer?
On Carnegie Hall’s opening night, I talked with a friend of mine who recalled a teacher at a New York conservatory years ago. If you admitted in his class that you liked Tchaikovsky, he kicked you out. Of course, no one remembers that man’s name. And Tchaikovsky’s will live forever, along with his music, as is perfectly just.
American Academy of Arts & Letters: Miller Theatre presents Jennifer Koh in “Bach: The Complete Solo Violin Works.” Oct. 23, W. 156th St., 212-368-5900, millertheatre.com; 2, $40.
Immanuel Lutheran Church: Delahanty/Mor Duo performs in “Furia d’amore – Love, Fury, and Despair in 17th-Century Italy” as part of the Midtown Concerts Series. Oct. 26, 122 E. 88th St., 212-289-8128, midtownconcerts.org; 1:15, free.
SONiC – Sounds of a New Century Festival: Miller Theatre & American Composers orchestra present a new 9-day festival of music composed in the past 10 years by over 100 composers age 40 & under. Ends Oct. 22, sonicfestival.org.
St. Ignatius of Antioch: Boston’s Blue Heron & the U.K.’s Ensemble Plus Ultra perform in “A 16th-century Meeting of England & Spain.” Oct. 16, 552 West End Ave., 212-580-3326, blueheronchoir.org; 4.
Symphony Space: Mari Kimura & Cassatt String Quartet perform “I-Quadrifoglio,” a work for strings & interactive computer, written in response to the Japanese earthquake & tsunami. Oct. 13, 2537 Broadway, 212-864-5400, symphonyspace.org; 7:30, $30.
