Concert Review: 2 French Masters a Century Apart, at Lincoln Center, NYC

Two Saturdays ago, I did something I cannot recall doing before: attending an afternoon matinee concert by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. I had seen two operas at Lincoln Center (Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, both nearly 40 years ago, when I was in college). But it was only when I saw a musical on the grounds a couple of weeks ago, My Fair Lady, that I thought of seeing a classical music concert.

The matinee on that Saturday worked well with my schedule. I can’t say that I know much about the composers featured in the program, but in a way that worked to my advantage, too, because my impressions would be fresh even as I learned more about the periods they represented: the Baroque and Romantic eras. 

David Geffen Hall, the concert venue, was built decades after the operas I saw here, courtesy of entertainment mogul David Geffen. While certainly a beautiful space, enough problems existed with the acoustics that a very expensive renovation plan was formulated. The price tag for that was so steep (a half-billion dollars) that it has been shelved, for now. However, I like one idea floated in connection with it: decreasing seating to increase audiences’ intimacy with the musicians. 

The first half of the show consisted of Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, by Gabriel Faure, late in the Romantic Era. The Adagio movement was so melancholy that at least one associate and biographer of the composer, Emile Vuillermoz, angrily denied that it was inspired by Faure’s broken engagement with a fiancée. Whatever the case, the quartet provided plenty of opportunities for impassioned playing by cellist Carter Brey, violinist Sheryl Staples, pianist Shai Wosner, and, on the viola, Cynthia Phelps.

In the second half of the concert, the full orchestra came out to tackle Selections From Dardanus, by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Guest conductor Emmanuelle Haim was at pains to communicate her passion and affinity for this Frenchman of the late Baroque period to these New York musicians. (When not wielding the baton, she was playing the harpsichord, the closest Baroque approximation to the piano.) While Faure was able to take advantage of 150 years of instrumental improvements since Rameau’s time, Rameau could draw on dramatic elements of his opera, especially a magic ring, a sea monster, and a total eclipse.

It might have been all to the good that the Rameau portion of the program dispensed with lyrics, as the opera from which it came sounds, in its entirety, like a bear to play (let alone to mount). Instead, the instrumental portions played here conveyed moods, especially Entrée por les guerriers (Entry of the Warriors) and Bruit de guerre (Notes of War).

Zachary Woolfe’s New York Times review of a concert from a few nights before, similar to what I saw (just replacing Faure with Handel’s Water Music) allowed that the Philharmonic had played with “lean grace,” but with “little surprise or delight, essential in this repertory.” 

I guess restraint is not in favor these days at the Good Gray Lady. But at least I (and, I believe, other listeners) heard an ensemble playing with precision and skill. 

It was also, I discovered in a post-show discussion moderated by Philharmonic librarian Lawrence Tarlow, an ensemble with deep understanding of the two wildly disparate musical eras on the program that day. The talk revolved around what it meant to have a “historically informed performance,” with featured members of the orchestra (oboeist Robert Botti, bassoonist Kim Laskowski, and violinist Kuan Cheng Lu) highlighting the challenges of different instruments, eras, and conductors:

*There are 45 keys in the modern oboe, for instance, but in the Baroque period there were only three, and there were difficulties with the instrument not found now.

*Kuan held up a violin bow, demonstrating   how in the Baroque, the wood curved outward, while later, with a “transitional” bow, the wood curved inward. 

* Laskowski observed that in the Baroque era, there were only two keys in the bassoon, with fingernails often tearing on holes in the instrument.

*The clarinet was only a single reed in the Baroque period, and with composers not yet writing for the instrument it was effectively not part of the music scene.

*Even without looking straight ahead, the musicians were well aware of Haim’s directions. Botti observed that her movements were still visible just above their instruments, and Kim noted that it was “not every day we play Baroque music,” so they “couldn’t help but feel” Haim’s energy.

*Newer instruments differ from earlier ones not so much by the age of the wood but the set-up of the instrument, according to Kuan. Kim noted that instrumentation is not static, but continues to improve all the time.

This concert was part of a series of four Saturday matinee post-show “talk-backs” with the Philharmonic’s musicians. Based on the informative nature of this one, I will try to attend the next one in February 2019.

This Day in Classical Music History (Gershwin’s ‘American in Paris’ Debuts)

December 13, 1928—Featuring what its composer termed “the most modern music I've yet attempted,” An American in Paris, the product of George Gershwin’s trips abroad to deepen his knowledge of orchestration and harmony, premiered across the Atlantic, performed by the New York Philharmonic and conducted by Walter Damrosch. Still only 30 years old, Gershwin was displaying the ambition that would enable him to transcend the boundaries of his Tin Pan Alley apprenticeship. Many musicians playing the piece at the premiere, though, did not appreciate his moxie. They would be horrified by the thought that the composition they performed with such little appreciation that night would  become one of the most loved classical music pieces of the last century.

Twelve years after this event, and three years after Gershwin’s untimely death, his close friend, pianist-composer-humorist-raconteur Oscar Levant, described an overnight train journey they had taken in A Smattering of Ignorance: “A lengthy discussion of music occupied us for an hour or so, and I was actually in the midst of answering one of his questions when he calmly removed his clothes and eased himself into the lower berth.... I adjusted myself to the inconveniences of the upper berth…. At this moment my light must have disturbed George [Gershwin’s]’s doze, for he opened his eyes, looked up at me and said drowsily, ‘Upper berth—lower berth. That’s the difference between talent and genius.’”

The anecdote tells us what good company the puckish Gershwin could be, but if he thought genius would have been enough to get him by, he would never have been serious enough to change musical direction—nor crucially, over the long term, figure out how he would apply the musical immersion he underwent with Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg. 

(Not that these men could understand his direction, either: Ravel asked, when Gershwin asked about receiving orchestra lessons from him, "Why would you want to risk being a second-rate Ravel when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?" Even Schoenberg, who did eventually come around and instructed him, marveled, after he heard about the American's current income from Broadway show tunes, that perhaps Gershwin ought to give him lessons.)

Gershwin made his first trip to Paris in 1924, after his success with Rhapsody in Blue. Two years later, after yet another visit, he decided to write a piece about the city that would capture an American’s impressions of it. To lend his composition extra authenticity, he even bought French taxi horns whose sounds he would use. 

But it would still not be until the spring of 1928, when he and lyricist brother Ira went to the city for some rest and relaxation after their work for the frenzied opening of their musical Rosalie for Florenz Ziegfeld, that he got to work on the idea forming in his head. (Ira, normally no slouch, used this time, as he put it, "[seeing] the sights and [drinking] beer.")

Gershwin completed his piano sketch for An American in Paris by early August, then his orchestration for it on November 18, less than a month from the premiere by Damrosch, who had also conducted the premiere of Gershwin’s prior major classical work, Concerto in F.

The New York Philharmonic reflected the loathing that traditional classical musicians possessed for the interloper Gershwin, who, for his part, attended its rehearsals dressed in a derby hat and smoking a cigar.  One music critic of the time exhibited similar snobbery over Gershwin’s attempt to cross musical boundaries: “An American in Paris is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane, that the average movie audience would be bored by it."

Au contraire, as they say. One Gershwin phrase about the piece he was planning in the summer of 1928—that it was “really a rhapsodic ballet”—may have inspired Hollywood to think about its possibilities for dance on film. In 1951, MGM released a movie that incorporated the name of the piece into its title and a generous helping of the composer’s music, though the half-hour composition itself was reduced to last than five minutes onscreen. It was a career highlight for star Gene Kelly, director Vincente Minnelli, and even Levant, whose character imagines himself playing Concerto in F before an audience in a large concert hall, taking on the successive roles of  pianist, conductor, kettle drummer, xylophonist, violinist, concert master and, at last, an audience member who shouts "Bravo, encore!"

Whether or not you agree that the movie should have won the Best Actor Oscar that year (beating out A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun), it surely remains one of the highlights of the American musical, just as the composer it honored remains safely esconced now in the classical music canon to which he aspired.

(The accompanying Bain News Service photograph of George Gershwin is now in the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division.)