Roll over, Beethoven
Flights of colorful fancy and heroic struggles characterized the Los Angeles Philharmonic concert Thursday at Walt Disney Concert Charles Francis Hall when Christoph von Dohnányi lED a program of Messiaen and Beethoven, with piano player Peter Serkin as the soloist. Messiaen, as it turned out, proved more captivating than Beethoven.
Serkin was filling in for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, wHO withdrew on doctor's advice because of back strain. Aimard was praised by Messiaen for performances of his music. But Serkin brings bona fides to the table overly.
He was i of the founders of Tashi, an tout ensemble formed in 1973 specifically to play Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time." Sooner this year, which is too the Messiaen centennial, Tashi performed for the number one time in 30 old age, and a highlight of the concerts that the chemical group played across the country was that Messiaen quartette, composed in a Nazi prisoner of war refugee camp in 1940-41.
Rudolf Serkin was besides the piano player at the first Symphony orchestra performance, in 1973, of Messiaen's "Oiseaux exotiques" (Exotic Birds), too on the program.
In the only program change resulting from Aimard's secession, Janácek's "Capriccio for Pianoforte Left Hand and Winds" was dropped. Instead, Serkin played Messaien's last solo work for piano, "Petites esquisses d'oiseaux" (Little Sketches for Birds), to open the concert.
The work consists of half a dozen short pieces, with the first, third and fifth devoted to the robin, and the others to the new World blackbird, song thrush and alauda arvensis. Serkin was deeply focused on the music and executed its chatter, colorful flourishes and velvety excursions around the keyboard with consummate commitment and skill.
There was a common sense of the old World robin being more and more subdued by its louder-voiced bird-fellows, merely this crataegus laevigata have been only 1 listener's reactions to this evocative, freewheeling music.
"Exotic Birds," for pianoforte and 18 confidential information and percussion instruments, which followed, has been described as the closest the composer came to composition a piano concerto. It has strikingly difficult piano passages that might easily qualify as cadenzas were they not so tightly integrated into the remain of the bit. Dohnányi allow Serkin moderately much have his dazzling way with these solo moments. Differently, the conductor executed strict controls.
At that place ar supposed to be references in the piece to around 60 birdcalls. But it sounded less like an ornithological catalogue than a fantastic, beguiling sound painting in delicate and boldface colours and liberate rhythms. Time was suspended and space was enlarged.
A twelve string basses onstage after intermission suggested that Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphonic music, which closed the broadcast, was non departure to receive a scaled-down, period-practice performance. In fact, there were about 75 musicians. But a large sound did non be big belief. Dohnányi light-emitting diode an well-nigh antiheroic functioning.
The ground wasn't simply his tendency toward speedy tempos. His leaning for larder attacks, long, inwardly unarticulated phrases and blended textures tamped pour down dramatic contrasts and stifled soul voices.
The main theme of the first movement lacked importunity and a sense of onward pains. The funeral march was a homogenized affair.
The galloping rhythms of the scherzo were taken with astonishing agility -- here, as elsewhere, the orchestra gave the conductor everything he wanted -- but they lacked the tension of off-centered jostle against for each one other. Even the andante in the closing curtain, a form of anamnesis of the departed, was wanting in intuitive feeling.
Dohnányi tamed the Beethoven wildcat, just at a huge price to the music and the composer.
chris.pasles@latimes.com
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