Symphony: Copland and Barber indifferently delivered


The audience for the opening night of the Houston Symphony’s weekend classical program was, as often is in the fall, thinly moderate in size. But visually it was one of the most interesting in a long while.

On the upper level, where the cheap and deluxe seats meet, there were the teen in suit, open-neck shirt and bright white tennis shoes, the 30s man in blue jeans, long-sleeve work shirt and short-cropped Mohawk, and the 20s guy in dark polo, khaki shorts, white socks and tennies.

True, the majority of the audience was skewed toward older patrons who were more traditionally dressed, but the Houston Symphony doesn’t lack good demographics. It simply lacks enough people in the hall, at least on the opening nights of three-concert series.

The program led by former Houston Symphony associate conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto was also very interesting at the outset. (Given the reactions of the audience, my comments may be a minority report of one.)

Instead of the usual big-orchestra arrangement of Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite, Prieto employed the original 13-instrument version created for Martha Graham and her dance company. The size was dictated by the small Library of Congress auditorium where the premiere took place but, to my taste, it makes the elegance and spareness of Copland’s simpler music much more compelling.

But the simplicity, let alone familiarity, doesn’t mean conductor and players can be satisfied or complacent. Unfortunately the performance was technically excellent but interpretatively plain.

As in many movements during the evening, Prieto started Appalachian Spring flabbily. Copland’s glorious suggestion of some kind of dawn hung in the air like Houston’s 7 a.m. humidity in the summer. There was no lightness, anticipation or energy in the playing.

At least from the Grand Tier, the balance among instruments was bad. It was an error to take the lid off the concert grand used in the performance. Many times its sound overwhelmed the rest of the ensemble and when it was functioning as a percussion instrument it cut through every sound.

In a program change, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg made the evening all-American. She ditched the originally scheduled Four Seasons by Astor Piazzolla when she couldn’t get the music in time to prepare adequately, the symphony reported. So she substituted Barber’s Violin Concerto.

Once a darling of the violin set, she has slipped toward the upper middle of the pack. She still has strong dates like Houston’s but she also plays a lot of part-time and regional orchestras.

Her performance Thursday was not up to star standards. Periodically she showed flashes of technical brilliance and brooding introspection, and her soft playing demonstrated emphatically that, in reality, the orchestra seldom plays very quietly.

A lot of the time, though, her playing was uneven. Tone quality varied greatly (her vibrato in the upper register could sound like that of an aging church choir soprano on the verge of a permanent wobble). Some technically challenging passages were smeared and melodies generally had a self-indulgent character and arc.

Prieto, now head of the Louisiana Philharmonic and a passel of orchestras in Mexico, didn’t seem to have comfortable command of Barber’s music (he was very score-bound). Generally, the interpretation lacked structural clarity and emotional forcefulness.

Copland’s Symphony No. 3 – reusing the popular Fanfare for the Common Man in the last movement – concluded the evening.

Once movements got under way they were sure-footed and often exciting. The second movement Scherzo at times sounded like Shostakovich having a good day, and the fanfare-driven last one was muscular and almost brazen.

But throughout the orchestra played at a level that was a big notch below what it displayed when music director Hans Graf was conducting in September. An early entrance by a first violinist at the start of Symphony No. 3 typified the problems. The playing wasn’t as clear, sharp and unified as it can be.


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Charles Ward

One Response

  1. Philip Short says:

    Taking the lid off of the piano does NOT result in a larger sound than usual at all, unless you are sitting behind the instrument, or perhaps suspended in mid-air. It is a much more diffuse sound than when the lid is set at the more typical “full stick” setting, where the sound is focused forward by the lid, and is thus a bigger, more penetrating sound than when the lid is off, by quite a margin. I can’t speak for why it was set this way (probably to allow other musicians to hear the piano on stage, as the Jones stage is a difficult one to hear each other on), but the notorious vagaries of what you hear in different parts of Jones is probably to blame for what you heard, as the balance was perfectly fine where I was sitting downstairs.

    As to the orchestra not playing softly enough for the soloist’s quieter playing: I found that Salerno-Sonnenberg’s erratic quality of phrasing also included a tendency to play with virtually NO tone at all, for some effect that is beyond my understanding. The start of the slow movement was perverse in this manner… orchestra can play softly enough to stay under that kind of completely unsupported tone. At other times she would veer in and out of supported tone in a completely random manner. If the orchestra had played to match this wayward style, one might think of someone twiddling with the volume knob on a stereo system. Her absurdly fast tempo in the last movement showed that she was unwilling to actually collaborate with conductor and orchestra at all, as it was a scramble at this unplayable tempo, and no where near the fairly sane one that Barber asks for….it was all a typically “me-me-me” interpretation that sacrificed musical coherence for moments of self-gratification.