It had been a decade and a year since the Vienna Philharmonic came our way to remind us how, for this storied ensemble of like-minded musicians, the medium can be magically both the message and the massage. The orchestra produces a ravishment of sound both immaterial and downright tactile.
The orchestra’s pair of concerts this week at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa were, as always, tradition-bound. The ensemble’s membership may have become slightly more international since last here. A few more women have been welcomed into its formerly misogynistic ranks. Old-timers’ fears of diversity diluting the unique Vienna affect — the blend of instruments being a wonder of the orchestral world — proved unsurprisingly unfounded.
The standard repertory, moreover, barely budges. Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák and Richard Strauss were on the tour’s docket — nothing written in the last 125 years.
One way to maintain its hold on a glorious past is for the musicians to run the show. The orchestra has no music director to push it in this or that direction. Every conductor is, in effect, a guest of the manor invited by the musicians. No breaking the china. Every piece by Mozart or Beethoven, every Viennese waltz, remains a venerated relic.
Yet to be Viennese is to be inherently open to an occasional fling or three. And the orchestra has had notable affairs with the unlikely likes of Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez. These days it shows fondness and respect for Esa-Pekka Salonen and downright love for Gustavo Dudamel. The Vienna Philharmonic sound is so sumptuous it takes a rare conductor to resist its advances. A Salonen or Dudamel is just as likely to get the Viennese to try something new.
Yannick Nézet-Séquin, who led the concerts at Segerstrom, is another who enjoys a long-term relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic. The French Canadian conductor, just turned 50, is a mainstay on the East Coast as music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He is prominent throughout Europe and much-recorded.
But he has had little exposure on the West Coast. Nézet-Séquin conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic once, 16 years ago. That is not, though, to say that he doesn’t care about L.A. He did drop everything (namely a chamber music concert with musicians from his Met Opera orchestra at Carnegie Hall) to show up at the Hollywood premiere of “Maestro,” having contributed to the bland soundtrack of the Leonard Bernstein biopic.
Nézet-Séquin’s popularity, however, hardly derives from blandness. The Viennese fondness for him may well be that, in his exuberance, he lets them live it up, even when that might mean chipping the china a little in his lust for splashy spectacle. Then again, lust in music, art and literature is one of Vienna’s great gifts to the world.
At Segerstrom, Nézet-Séquin had an interesting advantage. The hall opened shortly after Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson (formerly Verizon) Hall with a similar, but improved, acoustic design by Russell Johnson. Now in his 14th season with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Nézet-Séquin knows how to exploit Johnson’s variable sound-enhancing devices.
He got remarkable results. Rather than the warm acoustical refinement of the famed Musikverein, the Vienna Philharmonic’s home, every orchestral utterance jumped out at the audience like a 3D special effect. That could be full orchestra climaxes louder than you ever thought possible without amplification. The very, very quiet violas, cellos and basses opening Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony had a soul-filling robustness that even the best headphones couldn’t match. At either extreme, it could be hard, as a listener, to catch your breath.
Each of the two programs contained an early 19th century classical period work and concluded with a late 19th century romantic period one. Sunday afternoon the opener was Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with Yefim Bronfman as the bold-toned, rhythmically precise, eloquent soloist. Where permitted, Nézet-Séquin added sharp orchestral punctuations but otherwise let the orchestra support without fuss a commanding pianist.
That was followed, in the second half, by Strauss’ “Ein Heldenleben” as sonic spectacular. There is nothing new to that. Decades ago, a young Zubin Mehta blew Angelenos’ minds with “Heldenleben,” and his Los Angeles Philharmonic recording of it still can. Daniel Barenboim led a grandiloquent “Heldenleben” at Segerstrom Center’s older, acoustically troubled hall on an earlier visit of the Vienna Philharmonic.
In Nézet-Séquin’s performance, Strauss’ hero proved still larger than life. Brass blared, winds squawked, timpani thundered as though this hero who conquers music critics and makes love to his wife were Captain Marvel. The real marvel, in this instance, being the avoidance of vulgarity. No matter how hard the orchestra was pushed, it never sounded strained.
Much of the same could be said for the second program, Tuesday night, with Schubert’s early Fourth Symphony and the ubiquitous “New World.” In the Schubert, Nézet-Séquin went for bold Beethovenian effects that strained Schubert’s score. In the Dvorak, Nézet-Séquin appeared to want to outdo everyone else, making this “New World” a louder, softer, slower, faster place. He had the means. He had the acoustics. He had the persuasive power to get the orchestra to give its incomparable all.
The audience jumped to its feet, thrilled by the bravura of it. But it was just that, an hour of bravura, not a new world.
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