You’re not getting older, you’re getting better”—I’ve reached the age at which that platitude begins to feel like the mortician’s measuring tape. Although birthdays have become a somewhat questionable thing, make no mistake, I still love a good birthday party—so long as it’s not mine. In fact, I’ve had a great time at two of the installments in the monthlong Tennessee Bicentennial Arts and Entertainment Festival at TPAC.

The Nashville Symphony Orchestra’s 50th season of classical series concerts may have ended a few weeks ago, but they delivered one of their splashiest concerts this year with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in one of the biggest events in the bicentennial bash. It was a grand gala concert in Jackson Hall, and someone had taken time and pains with the decoration for the celebration.

The elegance of the setting was mirrored in the elegance with which the NSO performed Mozart’s Haffner symphony as the concert’s curtain-raiser. If one of the hallmarks of elegance is a certain ease with which difficulties are surmounted, then the clean playing in the work’s tricky opening passagework was a study in musical elegance. I might personally have preferred a bit more Sturm und Drang, but Mozart was not imitating Haydn here, and Kenneth Schermerhorn led his band with an eye more to the concerts spirituelles than the listening rooms at the Esterhazy estates. I also felt that the ensemble balance shortchanged the winds, but the strings were playing at a level of precision that I remembered from the NSO’s performance of Handel’s Messiah last December.

Unfortunately, the horns did not display a similar precision, but their beautiful sound provided a firm underpinning for the ensemble sound here. The oboes and bassoons distinguished themselves with their playing, and the violins were especially good in the ostinato episodes—borrowed, no doubt, from “Papa” Haydn’s Clock Symphony.

While one doesn’t normally consider the timpanist as an integral part of a minuet and trio movement, Bill Wiggins’ support helped to make the third movement. I thought that Maestro Schermerhorn might have allowed those orchestral sighs to breathe a bit more, but his quick tempi did prevent the music from dragging. Again, I might have preferred a bit more fire, but the aplomb with which the NSO negotiated tricky passages at high speed was a study in style galant elegance.

If the health of our beloved state at 200 is robust, I cannot say the same for the patrons of this concert, whose coughho obbligato virtually destroyed some of the finest moments during the NSO’s reading of Stravinsky’s Firebird. I believe that some budding thoracic surgeon could have made a career from the individual behind me in the grand tier, who made every soft passage an etude in phlegm. This is too bad, in light of what was a very good performance marked by clarity and balance. A shuffle of the feet to Ann Richards for her star turns and to Charlene Harb for those pianistic points of sound that really help to make Stravinsky’s orchestral color scintillate in this score.

The strings, lately perfecting their lushness in performances of Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, upped the ante here and delivered sound that went beyond lush to plush—their sound was that tactile. On a less sure note, the horns continued their problems with some clinkers at the beginning of the “infernal dance” episodes, and the brasses had some ensemble problems with their very first entrance. All this was forgotten, however, in light of the superb brass sound of the final pages.

It is said that Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheher-azade, with its tricky changes of tempo and meter, is the acid test of any young conductor. It is quite evident that Stravinsky owed much to Rimsky in writing The Firebird, because those same tricks are there for all to hear. It is a credit to Kenneth Schermerhorn’s skills that all was negotiated well, and it’s to the players’ credit that they were especially attentive to Schermerhorn’s conducting.

The Stravinsky and Mozart, however, were musical bonbons for many in the audience—they had come to see Mstislav Rostropovich perform the Dvorak cello concerto. Let me say that, in light of my last two Rostropovich performances, I was not looking forward to rewriting my recent remarks on Jean-Pierre Rampal. I needn’t have worried, though, because the performance was a fitting tribute to our state’s 200th birthday.

While I have always had problems with the fuzzy envelope of Rostropovich’s cello sound as well as his imprecise intonation in the cello’s upper register—and these problems were a part of this performance—Rostropovich has, at his best moments, displayed a musical taste and sensitivity second to none. This taste and sensitivity were on prominent display in some of the most beautiful pianissimi I have ever heard come from a cello, and they were especially telling in episodes during the first and last movements. During the final pages of the second movement, the power of Rostropovich’s lower notes marked some of his best playing of the evening.

Throughout the work, the clarinets and oboes distinguished themselves with their playing, and, after a rocky start, the horn solo in the first movement became beautiful and smooth. Kudos to the trumpet section for their muted fanfares à la Mahler in the finale; they were a splendid foil to the soloist’s lyric power. That lyric power was also on display during both of Rostropovich’s encores, a sarabande and bourée from Bach’s cello suites. The trills and good contrasts between clipped and legato playing in the bourée were very good, but the autumnal, almost Brahmsian introspection of the sarabande was unforgettable.

Piping Up

Mozart’s Magic Flute was almost new music when Tennessee became a state. It was also the first opera that I attended—in a performance at Memphis State University during my high-school days. I still remember that during the first scene the three ladies of the Queen of the Night were required to spear to death the dragon pursuing the opera’s hero, Tamino. The spear became entangled in the dragon’s papier-mâché head, and no effort by any of the ladies could dislodge it. When the curtain came down, the dragon was in front of it, and the suddenly reanimated beast dragged spear and all off into the wings. The performance went down from there.

I still remember the fulminations of the Queen of the Night and all those great tunes, however, and dumb plot or not, Magic Flute is still magical for me. As for that magic continuing, Nashville Opera’s recent bicentennial tribute was in the Houdini category. It all began with the decision to do Magic Flute in one of the best translations I’ve yet encountered. Not only was it singable, it wasn’t laden with stupid poeticisms, it was clear and direct, and words in the first lines were chosen for their consonance with the German originals.

Most of the singers reinforced this concept of understandability by forsaking operatic diction for something closer to the original feel of the singspiel of the Broadway stage. You could understand what these people were singing at almost all times—and what splendid singing it was. I predict a great career for the production’s Tamino, Curt Peterson. His melting lyricism, combined with a real weight during the moments when heroism was required, was Mozartian perfection. He was also such a good actor that he made you believe in the reality of his actions, even in the dumbest of situations.

Dale Morehouse’s Papageno was another example of this production’s attention to the natural style. He was a fine comic actor with an ordinary voice that he used with extraordinary finesse. Those familiar with the great Papagenos of the past will probably fault his lack of traditional warmth in vocal production, but his singing was more than warm enough, and the reality with which he approached the character left me rooting for the everyman who wants no more out of life than someone to love, enough to eat and drink, and children to ensure the future.

If Kevin Maynor as Sarastro lacked full ease with his part’s lowest notes, his resonant bass voice and commanding stage presence were impressive. In the big-players-make-big-parts category, Stacy Rigg, Hope Crawford and Elizabeth Huling were not only dynamite singers, they were funny and believable. Marilyn Taylor turned in a beautifully sung and winsome Pamina, and Teri Johnson’s Papagena was a fine piece of acting, as was Darren Keith Woods’ Monostatos. The one star not with the program was Elizabeth Carter: Her Queen of the Night was very operatic in the bel canto mode. I really wanted her to rage and bellow more, but her emphasis on vocal beauty caused her to slow down the pyrotechnics of her big numbers so she could get all the notes in.

Special praise goes to the set and costume designers for both flexibility and imagination. I do, however, wish that there had been some way to cover the many scene changes. Having the handlers come out in street clothes to dress the set was one of the few lapses in the seamlessness of Nashville Opera’s production.

There’s much more to come with the Arts and Entertainment Festival during May: performances by Opera Memphis, Itzak Perlman with the Chattanooga Symphony, André Watts with the Knoxville Symphony, and our own NSO’s Salute to the Tennessee Composer on May 25. Put on a funny hat and join the bicentennial party, but, please, someone else will toot the horn.