A Strong Start
Despite tentative support for Itzhak Perlman’s bravura performance, Nashville Symphony shines in season opener
by Marcel Smith
Nashville Symphony Orchestra
w/guest violinist Itzhak Perlman
Sept. 4 at TPAC’s Jackson Hall
Last Thursday in Jackson Hall, Nashville Symphony launched its new season with an adroitly chosen program excitingly delivered. The evening’s center was Itzhak Perlman as soloist in the Beethoven violin concerto. Perlman’s name and reputation delivered a very nearly full house—the best house I’ve seen since Jessye Norman appeared there. But though Perlman himself delivered his customary magic, he was not what made the evening memorable. Indeed, he played just before the intermission, after which perhaps 20 percent of the house did not come back. That’s too bad, because what the defectors missed was arguably better than what they heard.
Paradoxically, even as the Beethoven highlighted the soloist’s wizardry, it also highlighted the orchestra’s deficiencies—some of which derive from the conductor’s eccentricities. Make no mistake, Kenneth Schermerhorn’s musical knowledge is deep and wide, and his musical taste keen and admirable. During this entire program, his choice of tempos seemed just right, and his sense of each composition as an architectural whole made it a delight to hear that building actualize. “Kenneth knows what the music ought to sound like,” oboist Bobby Taylor once told me. “That’s what matters, not what he does with the stick.” Alas, only half of that judgment is true.
Schermerhorn may well be the last surviving alumnus of the Leonard Bernstein school of baton management. Bernstein, undeniably a great musician, was nearly unique in doing things with the stick that no player could be expected to follow. None of the other conductors who has led our orchestra emulates the eccentric swirls and parabolas Schermerhorn’s stick executes on the podium. The players do not—dare not—look at the conductor. Accordingly, the orchestra plays best when the audible musical pulse is steady and predictable. When the pulse varies—slowing down, getting faster—the result is what a friend calls “fuzzy strings,” when players are not quite together, in intonation or in rhythm. The strings, and the winds, were fuzzy more than once last Thursday.
For the strings, it was most evident in a lovely slow passage in the Beethoven, when Perlman’s violin was singing an exquisite lyrical solo line above the other strings playing a pianissimo pizzicato accompaniment, like a giant mandolin. The passage remained lovely, but it could have been lovelier.
The Beethoven’s purest musical moments happened in Perlman’s two cadenzas, one just before the end of the first movement, the other just before the end of the concerto, when the soloist flew solo. Traditionally improvised, cadenzas nowadays are mostly written down beforehand. Perlman may well have improvised his own, but wherever they came from, they were brilliant bravura utterances, flawlessly and effortlessly delivered, and shaped so that the solo voice just melted right back into the ensemble at the end of its flight.
Perlman notwithstanding, the rest of the evening’s program was better than the Beethoven. The architecture of the program as a whole seemed just right. The evening’s prelude was the national anthem, in a luscious zesty arrangement by Ronn Huff. That was followed by an uncommonly audacious (for this orchestra) romp by Daron Hagen (b. 1961). Premiered in May 2000, this piece is entitled Much Ado after Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
Hagen’s sound is mostly large and rich, marked by a steady pulse driving intricately lively textures that recall both the Renaissance lute and Charlie Parker’s saxophone. Amid this lusty turbulence swim long, strong brass melodies that rise, and disappear, and rise again. Hagen quotes a line from Shakespeare’s comedy that also fits his own work: “What a merry, exhilarating play.” Much Ado was a beautifully chosen piece for this orchestra in this hall, filling the venue’s space with vital energy. Perlman took up that energy and shaped it into a triumph of his own in the Beethoven concerto.
After intermission came another adventuresome pair—Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” and Ottorini Respighi’s Pini di Roma (Roman Pines). Britten (1913-76) wrote his score for an instructional film. His music, furnished with commentary, brilliantly identifies the four standard orchestral sections—woodwinds, strings, brass and percussion—first by using them all together to deliver a big exotic dance tune from fellow Briton Henry Purcell (1659-1695) before having each section do a set of variations on that tune and then putting all the sections together again in a brilliant grand fugue finale.
Nowadays, the work is often heard in concerts, without the commentary, as Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell. But Thursday night, the commentary was delivered with understated graceful effectiveness by Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee.
The Britten set up a perfect segue to the evening’s final selection—a symphonic poem that displays with exuberant abundance the several sections of a very large orchestra. Respighi (1879-1936) is today chiefly known for three rich and brilliant tone poems, of which Pini di Roma (1924) is the second. The score divides into four sections, played without a break, each named for a particular part of the Eternal City, each an orchestral evocation of the atmosphere and emotional force of its locale. The piece opens with impressions of children in semi-savage play and ends with an army marching triumphantly along the Appian Way toward the Capitol.
Pini di Roma seems perfectly designed for this orchestra and this conductor in this space. Schermerhorn conducted without a score and made of the music as much theatrical spectacle as auditory phenomenon. As the final movement of the evening’s finale built toward a splendid thunderous climax, Schermerhorn turned and cued brass players who had quietly taken positions high up behind the loge seats at stage right. These players joined in a call-and-response kind of antiphonal dialogue with the full orchestra below, and Jackson Hall filled solid with vibrant splendid sound.
This was, on balance, the finest performance I have heard from this orchestra in the years I have been listening to it. It shows again that the orchestra can play with the best of the big boys. It also suggests that what they choose to play may determine how well they are able to play it. One performance, of course, doth not a season make. But brazen splendor rings still in my ears. I hope to hear it soon again.
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