Last night, Jaap van Zweden conducted the New York Philharmonic in a program of three canonical works. It ended with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Is that even legal? Can you get away with such a program in this day and age? Van Zweden did. He is nearing the end of his tenure with the New York Phil. Maybe he just said, “The hell with it.”
He has paid his dues, as far as I’m concerned. He accompanied a drag show (or whatever the accepted term is). There he was, beating his arms in a rendition of “Walk Like an Egyptian.” What more do you want from the guy?
He had earned his Beethoven Fifth (although the idea that you have to earn it is strange). Van Zweden has been underappreciated in New York, certainly by the press. I think, however, he has been appreciated by musicians, who think that music is the thing rather than the political and other concerns that surround it.
Last night’s concert opened with Mendelssohn: his Hebrides overture (also known as Fingal’s Cave). Van Zweden began the work superbly—in medias res. The work was not beginning, you see: Van Zweden and the orchestra were simply tuning in to something that was already going on. The playing was horizontal, rippling. It was also very warm. Not often do you say, “The New York Phil. was warm.” But it was very much so in this music.
A predecessor of Van Zweden’s here in New York conducted a lot of Mendelssohn—that was Kurt Masur. Masur spent many years in Leipzig, as Mendelssohn did. He conducted his Mendelssohn with “Beethoven qualities,” I would say. It was not soupy or wayward. It had a certain masculinity or rigor. This is true of Van Zweden’s Mendelssohn as well.
The slower parts of the overture did not lag, which is critical. Two clarinets sang a nice duet in harmony. And the overture had a precise ending—which goes a long way. People tend to remember the beginning of a performance and the end.
You can go many a moon without hearing a Hebrides so good as last night’s.
Next came Mozart: his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G major, K. 453, which is one of the best piano concertos he ever wrote. That’s kind of a silly statement to make—like saying “one of the best games Michael Jordan ever played.” You haven’t exactly narrowed it down.
The soloist was Conrad Tao, who is one of those players who “roll their own”: who compose as well as play. I first heard him—his piano playing and his music—when he was a teenager at Le Poisson Rouge in the Village. In a few months, he will be a grand old man of thirty.
I told the friend sitting next to me, “You watch. He’ll come out looking like a Brooklyn hipster.” And, lo, Mr. Tao wore a sharp black suit with a T-shirt.
From the orchestra, Maestro Van Zweden got a desired Mozartean bounce. The orchestra’s playing was full and unabashed but not the least bloated. Like James Levine, Neville Marriner, and others, Van Zweden finds a “sweet spot” in Mozart: between period-practice wheat germ and chocolate blackouts.
In the opening movement, Conrad Tao was supple and stylish. He was correct and expressive. He was pure and clean. You could hear the left hand when you were supposed to (which is not always the case with pianists). As befits a composer, he brought his own cadenza. It had an air of originality while corresponding with the concerto. I think Mozart would have approved.
The middle movement, Andante, is a sublime thing. I want to tell pianists: Don’t do anything to it! Mozart has already “done” it. Just play it! This is what Mr. Tao did. Also, he engaged in a nice conversation—musical conversation—with the orchestra alongside him.
In the final movement, he was fleet and graceful. He interpolated a few Taoisms. I think this is permissible and that, again, Mozart would have approved.
Lately, I have been talking about encores—specifically, the announcements of. (See here and here.) Too often, performers mumble their announcement. They confuse the audience, who ask one another, “Did you hear him? What did he say?” Better to forgo an announcement and simply play than confuse the audience with unintelligibility.
Like Jan Lisiecki in Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, Tao was loud and clear. He was also charming, in his remarks.
He played his own “interpretation” of an Art Tatum recording of “Over the Rainbow.” I would have asked for more elegance and less aggressiveness from Tao. But I am delighted he is drawn to Tatum, as Rachmaninoff and Horowitz were before him.
All right: Beethoven’s Fifth. Did you ever hear Toscanini conduct? Probably not. But last night, you did, in a sense, because Jaap van Zweden delivered a very Toscaninian performance—or a Van Zwedenesque one. It was bracing and virile. It had heroic strength. It did practically no lingering. It did not stop and smell the flowers. It said, in essence, “Smell your own damn flowers. This is the way it goes.”
Even for me—and I like this approach—it was a little brusque. But, oh, it was glorious: a cold, stirring, ennobling shower.
The woodwind section was first-rate. The horns behaved, mainly. And here is a detail: in the transition from the third movement to the finale, the timpani beats were unusually prominent—like heartbeats, grabbing the listener’s attention.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony suffers from overfamiliarity, perhaps. That is not its fault. Say you had never heard the symphony and knew nothing about its reputation and heard it for the first time. What would you say? Would you say, “That’s the greatest piece of music ever written”? Possibly. And you would not be far off.
I often quote Robert Graves (or paraphrase him): “The thing about Shakespeare is, he really is good.”
I quote another Robert, too—Robert Shaw. When conducting a great and famous work, he would often say at the final rehearsal: “Remember: There will be people in the audience hearing the piece for the first time. And the last time. Make it good.”
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony last night was very, very good.
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Source: newcriterion.com
