By Donald Waxman
On the next-to-the-last evening of the 2013 Festival of the Arts Boca, Peter Oundjian, the Canadian conductor and violinist, led the New World Symphony of Miami in three early 20th-century works.
The guest soloist was the Russian-American pianist Valentina Lisitsa, whose career in recent years has flourished in an unprecedented way. The program promised to be a very unusual one, especially for Boca audiences. The centerpiece of the program was Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Op. 43) for piano and orchestra. It was flanked by two infrequently played symphonies by major early 20th-century composers, the American Samuel Barber and the English Ralph Vaughan Williams. On paper, it looked to be a stellar event. I am happy to report that the concert lived up to such expectations and surpassed them.
We should all be proud that both the orchestra and the soloist of Friday’s concert have strong roots in Miami. The New World Symphony was founded 25 years ago in Miami by famed conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and is America’s only full-time orchestral academy preparing young musicians for careers in symphony orchestras. Its success can be measured by the fact that more than 600 alumni of the New World Symphony are presently playing in over 150 professional orchestras around the world. If any concertgoers unfamiliar with the New World had qualms about hearing a “training orchestra,” such doubts must have been quickly dispelled within the first three minutes of the opening work. This is a band of dedicated young virtuosi who are already well on their way to professional orchestral careers.
South Floridians will remember Lisitsa well from the time she and her two-piano partner Alexei Kuznetsoff arrived in Miami from their native Ukraine in the early 1990’s and won the coveted Dranoff International Two Piano Competition. The duo team settled in Miami, and Lisitsa, a dazzling technician and sensitive interpreter with a particular affinity for Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff, was heard frequently in solo recitals in the region.
In time, the couple, who were now married, moved to rural North Carolina; and it was here that Lisitsa began to fear that her concert career was languishing. Her husband, who had become very proficient in computer, audio and photographic techniques, came to the rescue. With his help the couple produced a series of videos of the pianist both performing and speaking about music and posted these on YouTube.
Lisitsa is very photogenic, her wide blue eyes and long blond hair reminding us old movie buffs of the film star Veronica Lake, and her very personal conversations about music, delivered in a lilting Russian accent, are very charming. These features combined with high-fidelity audios of her performing and the highly professional shots of her hands at the keyboard proved irresistible. The videos went viral. In an astoundingly short time Lisitsa’s YouTube channel had been seen by over 30 million viewers. She had become one of the most popular classical music artists on the web. Success in the real concert world quickly blossomed: a new concert management, solo and orchestral engagements around the world, recording contracts – a star was born, or rather, reborn.
Unlike the orchestra and the concert soloist, the Canadian-born conductor Peter Oundjian is not well-known to South Florida audiences though some of us may remember that he was the first violinist of the renowned Tokyo String Quartet for many years. A hand injury cut short that association after which Oundjian turned his abundant musical talents to conducting. Recognized early on for his fine ear and communicative skills in handling an orchestra, Oundjian quickly rose up in the highly competitive orchestral world. He is now the music director of both the Toronto Symphony and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Before the concert began, Oundjian, an urbane and polished speaker, told the audience that all three of the works on the program were written in the 1930s. It is hard to believe that the Paganini Rhapsody of Rachmaninov, “the last of the great Romantics,” was written in 1934, more than 20 years after the tumultuous premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris.
Musical history is unpredictable, though. Unlike science, which moves ever upward, each decade becoming more advanced than the preceding, compositional styles move sideways, with considerable overlapping from one historical period to the next. When Bach was writing some of his finest music in the waning days of the late Baroque, the younger generation of composers at that time considered him very outdated. That disdainful viewpoint does not seem to have hurt Bach’s reputation in the past 250 years, and I doubt that Rachmaninov’s popularity has suffered because music critics and historians consider him to have been a composer after his time rather than before his time.
The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is, I think, Rachmaninov’s finest work for piano and orchestra. It has a tautness and succinctness that are not the qualities one associates with his concertos. In fact, it has to be concise. In a work of 24 separate segments, a composer cannot afford to be expansive lest the piece take up the entire concert. The wonder is that Rachmaninov could display such invention and such mastery of harmonic and thematic variation techniques in a set where some of the variations are less than a minute long.
The opening theme and the first half a dozen or so variations were taken at too fast a clip, I thought. Not that the pianist or orchestra dropped a stitch along the way, but that the clarity in the articulation of musical gestures was somewhat compromised. Thereafter, the tempo eased off just enough that the ideas in the variations were more clearly articulated. When the opening of the famous 18th Variation rose slowly out of the final measures of the preceding variation, an audible sigh rippled through the audience in anticipation of one of Rachmaninov’s most memorable melodies. Actually it is the snappy Paganini theme in minor key turned upside down and transformed into a slow, sensuous song in major key, the kind of ineffably yearning melody that has been seducing music lovers from Rachmaninov’s early piano preludes to his concertos, particularly the Second and Third. It was to be Rachmaninov’s swan song; never again would he write one like it.
Lisitsa and the orchestra played the variation with admirable restraint, letting Rachmaninov’s lyricism unfold gently. Some interpreters of this variation pull out all the stops, transforming an already sensuous movement into a somewhat vulgar one. From this point on to the end, the music steadily gathered momentum as pianist and orchestra raced to the final explosive climax. And then at the very end came those surprising last two measures where Rachmaninov recalls a fragment of the original theme, as though he were saying, “Here, Paganini, you can have the theme back; it is, after all, your theme, not mine.”
The audience stood up with an explosive roar and a long standing ovation for the dazzling performance. Oundjian was the perfect accompanist for the soloist, retreating whenever the piano needed to stand out and moving the orchestral tuttis to the fore without overpowering the structure of the music. He anticipated the soloist’s melodic moments with great skill. This is a difficult challenge for a conductor when collaborating with a soloist whose melodic playing is as flessibile as Lisitsa’s.
The New World’s members played like seasoned pros. The soloist has always had a glittering technique, which she seems to come by effortlessly; and she has always played with great involvement. However, the adrenalin that has come from her recent successes seems to have ratcheted up these qualities by several notches.
In introducing the opening work of the evening, Samuel Barber’s First Symphony, the conductor praised the work as a neglected 20th-century masterpiece. It is an intense work with a powerful, brooding first movement, a very captivating scherzo-like middle movement and a somewhat overwrought finale. It is an impressive accomplishment for a 25-year-old composer writing his first symphony, and personally I was grateful to have had this opportunity to hear the work for the first time.
But I would guess that many in the audience found the Barber symphony somewhat severe. If they knew Barber’s music at all, they were probably expecting a very accessible work like the School for Scandal Overture or a very melodic work like Knoxville, Summer of 1915. Oundjian is to be commended for his dedication in playing the works of living composers or the neglected works of important 20th-century composers who have passed away. Too many of our conductors today are Mozart specialists or Mahler specialists, and too few like Oundjian are champions of contemporary music.
That said, I think it was a mistake to have programmed the Barber First Symphony on the same concert as the Vaughan Williams Fourth Symphony, which is without question a 20th-century masterpiece. In Toronto, in New York, in San Francisco, yes; but this is South Florida, where concert audiences are very conservative. They are polite and attentive, but that attentiveness has its limits; and I think a challenging work such as the Barber symphony on the first half of the program diluted the interest in the Vaughan Williams symphony on the second half. Better it would have been to have opened the evening with a Haydn symphony or a Brandenburg Concerto or a light-hearted 20th-century masterpiece such as Stravinsky’s Pulcinella.
Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony, written in 1935, must have hit the British concert audiences at that time like a thunderbolt. An angry, muscular and often discordant work, it once and for all gave the lie to the perception that Vaughan Williams was just a composer of pretty, bucolic music. Oundjian in his introductory remarks about the Fourth Symphony said that many critics at the time thought that the work was an expression of Vaughan Williams’ traumatic experiences in the First World War. As medical orderly, he had at the end of each day to go out on the battlefield and pick up the wounded and the corpses. Vaughan Williams denied any association between his war experiences and the Fourth Symphony.
Yet the work, unlike any other of the composer’s orchestral music that preceded it, does have an agonized, bellicose character from the opening jagged statement, a kind of orchestral scream, to the strange march-like motifs in the last movement that sound like a military band run amok. A difficult work to perform, the Fourth Symphony is infrequently played in this country but is obviously better known in the U.K. and my guess in Canada as well. Oundjian certainly seemed to know the symphony intimately. He communicated his ideas to the New World players forcefully, and they responded in a cohesive and energetic fashion. It was some of the best playing of the evening.
Thus ended an exciting orchestral evening: a dynamic conductor, a spirited young orchestra, a glamorous solo artist, and an unusual and interesting program. The only thing missing was an audience. Where was the audience for such an important musical event? The space under the Festival tent was scarcely more than half-filled.
Perhaps the marketing could have been more aggressive: Why, for instance, didn’t the festival send out individual emails preceding each of the large-scale events? Certainly for this evening concert, a promotional email highlighting Lisitsa should have been forwarded to everyone on the Festival’s mailing list. One could have used the home page of Lisitsa’s personal website, which shows her playing – you guessed it – the 18th Variation of the Paganini Rhapsody. Maybe the festival’s marketers could learn something from the promotional team of Al and Val (as their friends call them). After all, their techniques worked wonders for Valentina.
Donald Waxman is a composer and contributing writer to Palm Beach ArtsPaper.