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We don't often think about the ushers at a place like Carnegie Hall, but
they hear more music than most of us. And after the Pittsburgh Symphony played
Shostakovich not long ago, they were almost speechless. I passed a little knot of them
after the concert, and found them struggling for words, trying to describe the power of
what they'd just heard. I agreed with them, and told them so. You could go to concerts all
your life, I said, and hear a performance like this only once or twice.
Not that the evening began all that
well. First came "Fantasia on an Ostinato," by John Corigliano, a composer with
an invaluable gift for writing music that's unassailably modern, and at the same time easy
on the audience. "Fantasia," though, struck me as essentially a stunt, in which
Mr. Corigliano took the slow movement theme from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, with its
familiar dogged rhythm, and dressed it in splashy new outfits. Mariss Jansons, in his
first season as the Pittsburgh Symphony's music director, had vivid, alert fun with this,
almost visibly sculpting color with his hands. (He doesn't use a baton.) But what would he
do with a more substantial score?
Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto,
which came next, wasn't too encouraging. Radu Lupu, the soloist, leaned back from the
keyboard, as if to say, "Yes, I know this music . . . it goes something like
this." Mr. Jansons, meanwhile, seemed to inspect the piece from the inside, as if he
were thinking, "Here's a fascinating little detail . . . now here's another."
Two more contrary performances could hardly be imagined.
But then came
intermission, and after it the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. Years ago, I heard James
Levine conduct Verdi's "Don Carlo" at the Metropolitan Opera. In the soprano
role was Renata Scotto, a singer Mr. Levine deeply admired. At one point Ms. Scotto sang
something extraordinary, and, as if inspired, Mr. Levine got the orchestra to play exactly
what she sang, down to the last nuance of her phrasing and her tone of voice.
That's what Mr. Jansons did with
Shostakovich. The Pittsburgh musicians played as if there were no distance between the
printed notes and their performance, as if they'd heard Shostakovich singing and played
exactly what was in his voice.
There were technical marvels as
well, brutal, sardonic, authoritative whipcracks from the brass, and thoughtful playing
from the strings that wasn't just quiet, but passionately hushed. Mr. Jansons seems to
inhabit a world of unmeasurable nuance, where, between sounds that are very soft and
sounds that are all but inaudible, there are more steps than most other conductors find in
the full dynamic range, from soft to very loud. (Or, more realistically, from mildly soft
to very loud, since most conductors can't get orchestras to play quietly). The last string
chords of the third movement were so purely focused on the music that they might have been
breathed, not bowed.
Or really I should say "focused
on the meaning of the music," because that's what this performance was about.
Shostakovich, as is well-known, was in a difficult position when he wrote this symphony.
He was Russian, living under Stalin's tyranny, and a previous work had been denounced as
cacophonous and, worse, unable to "inspire the masses" -- in other words,
anti-Soviet. That meant not just that his career was in danger, but his life, and he
designed his Fifth Symphony as an act of rehabilitation, subtitling it "A Soviet
Artist's Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism."
But inwardly, as we know now,
Shostakovich was enraged and frightened when he wrote the piece, and meant some of it as
bitter mockery. The mockery is clearest at the end, where the official Communist rejoicing
in the brass sounds (or should sound) forced, "as if someone were beating you with a
stick," to quote what Shostakovich wrote in his memoirs.
Enter Mr. Jansons, a 54-year-old Latvian who himself lived under Soviet rule, and seems
to understand Shostakovich's bitterness. "He told us that the end of the piece
shouldn't sound triumphant," says Robert Langevin, the Pittsburgh Symphony's
principal flautist. "It should have a lot of sarcasm, which is very different from
the way other conductors do it."
There were purely musical points
that Mr. Jansons emphasized, to bring out the hollow mockery. "He told the brass the
ending shouldn't be bright," says Mr. Langevin. "He wanted a darker sound."
But, above all, he seems to evoke a spirit of collaboration, in which the musicians
themselves make his meaning their own. At one point, I saw him turn to the first violins,
barely beating time, his left hand extended in what I could only see as an invitation.
"Play the music," he seemed to be saying. "Play the way you feel
it."
Mr. Langevin interprets this the
same way, noting that Lorin Maazel, the previous music director in Pittsburgh, was very
precise about every detail, while Mr. Jansons "talks about the mood he wants to
create, but won't always give specific instructions. There are even times in a concert
where he will stop conducting, so everyone is forced to listen to each other." At
this point Mr. Langevin laughed, because, he says, Mr. Jansons warned the players that
they're going to be surprised at concerts. "One time he wants something loud, another
time he wants the same thing soft. We have to pay attention, because we never know what's
coming."
The results? Tremendous enthusiasm
from the musicians. ("How often would we talk this way about a music director?"
asks Mr. Langevin, who knows how jaded orchestral players can be.) And, at Carnegie Hall,
a final climax in the Shostakovich Fifth that was physically huge but emotionally complex,
enormously loud and bitterly harsh but never brutal. It wasn't even brutal when the bass
drum took the lead in the final three bars, the player slamming his instrument like a man
possessed, producing a noise that nearly made the walls shake, but was never coarse.
It remains only to say that Mr.
Jansons, universally praised by musicians and people in the music business, isn't yet
well-known to the American public. In part that's because he's worked most closely with
orchestras that aren't famous here, especially the Oslo Philharmonic, where he's been
music director since 1979. His recording of the Shostakovich Fifth with the Vienna
Philharmonic isn't on the level of his Carnegie Hall performance, maybe because the
orchestra isn't closely identified with the music. But his CDs of three other symphonies
-- the Shostakovich Eleventh with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Sibelius Second with
Oslo, and the Rachmaninoff Second with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic -- bear out what I
heard. At least in big orchestral works, Mr. Jansons is one of the deepest and most
spontaneous conductors alive, a man to rush out and hear.
Wall Street Journal, March 26, 1998
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