Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Gubaidulina Premiere: Bosch Meets Techno

Just got back from a terrific concert: Simon Rattle and the Philadelphia Orchestra (our local musical wet dream) with the world premiere of "Feast During a Plague," a symphonic poem based on a short scenario by Pushkin set in a tavern during ... well, a plague. It's not a literal setting, we were informed in the program notes by Paul Griffiths. (Who then went on with more than a page of blow-by-blow description, which is so useless: trying to follow it is like trying to drive in a strange landscape with arbitrary and wayward blinders and color-tint lenses on.)

For the first 15 minutes or so, it's an exquisitely composed and orchestrated evocation of decay -- which Gubaidulina, in an excellent Inquirer profile by David Patrick Stearns, describes as "the disease [which, unlike in the middle ages] isn't one you catch and then cure. The disease now takes over the souls of people. That's much more serious. I'm not sure how much Americans sense that." (But with her, you don't feel like you're being reflexively hectored by a nattering Euro-nabob.) Much of the material is based on major and minor seconds and glissandi, but it's paced and passed around the orchestra with such deftness that it's like looking at a Bosch painting: it's so queasy-looking, but precisely rendered, and the detail work is what makes you acutely uneasy. I've never heard this kind of writing brought off with such precision.

And props to Rattle and the musicians for realizing it so extraordinarily well -- except for the horn section, who was entrusted with a Mahler 3rd-worthy opening solo and MUFFED IT, and most of their other featured writing, as badly as they did last season in the Mahler 3rd. Are these really the best we can get?

But the big surprise comes at about the 15 minute mark. The program notes neatly refer to it as "an intervention from a new sound source." It's about 10 seconds of prerecorded techno (drums only, unpitched) which cuts in and out like a door opening and closing on a rave in the next room. The volume is about equal to that of the orchestra, which is nevertheless still audible underneath. At first this didn't seem to work for me, but after a few minutes the orchestral writing started to close in on it the way that the human body surrounds and encapsulates a foreign body (such as, say, buckshot). It was eerie, but not in the theremin sense. I felt short of breath, like a mild panic state that comes on when you realize something awful has just happened. How all of this came together in the notes of the score to produce this effect is beyond me. I'd need to listen to it many more times, which I hope I get the opportunity to do, preferably with these musicians. Is it too much to hope that the orchestra's live recording program with Ondine, which seems to be playing it quite safe so far, might give us this?

The second half of this one-time combination was the Walton First Symphony, which Stearns raved about when the orchestra played it on last week's concerts, and I can only agree. (The Gubaidulina, premiered tonight, will be played in thie coming weekend's series paired with something more conventional.) This is the kind of piece that was made for Rattle, and which our Philly Orchestra can bring off like a twelve-cylinder Maserati (or whatever the world's best car is these days).

One thing I noticed tonight that I've seen before, and which someone should work on: from the ground level one sees mostly string players. Except for the respective first chair players, most of the faces and bodies I could see looked like anderoids. The first chair players sat forward, with vivid arm and hand movements that surely focused their playing, and a look of alacrity on their faces. The others sat mostly motionless, one guy reclining like he was waiting for someone to feed him grapes, with expressionless faces and minimal movement. They seemed so disengaged. Even during the ample applause for both pieces, the first-chair people were smiling and enjoying the audience's good wishes, whereas most of the others looked bored or, in some cases, distressed. Someone should show them a picture of how they look. It's a bit of a downer. But they did sound good.

PS - This isn't the first time that Rattle and the Philadelphians rocked my world. Back in 1993 (when I still lived next door to Jerry), at Carnegie Hall, they did a Mahler Ninth for the ages. It was the performance I'd been waiting for, and which I'd bought about seven recordings in search of. One of the best concerts of my life.

posted by Eric J. Bruskin 2/15/2006