There was also a major American piece that was not a ballet score: Roger Sessions’s 1935 Violin Concerto. The soloist was former Monadnock concertmaster Ole Bohn, now concertmaster of the Royal Norwegian Opera. Bohn and Bolle entered with a friendly high five, but not all that followed went smoothly. A magnificent musician who plays a sumptuous 1766 Guadagnini, Bohn excels in ferociously demanding music — he’s the dedicatee of Carter’s Violin Concerto, which he premiered with the San Francisco Symphony. Sessions’s concerto opens with a trombone solo (the orchestra includes strings but no violins) and a high-lying passage of great lyricism for the violinist. Throughout, the soloist has numerous piquant duets with various woodwinds. A playful staccato Scherzo gets interrupted by a brooding slow section, then there’s a slow Romanza before the perpetual-motion finale (Molto vivace e sempre con fuoco), with hints of jazz and a polka. It’s one of Sessions’s most moving and appealing works, and Bohn was an ideal soloist.
But a few minutes into the fiery finale, Bohn stopped the performance, mimed a tempo, and the movement started over again. A bit later, he interrupted again. “Either it was polyrhythms or they just weren’t together at all,” someone commented on the way out. The concerto was being recorded, so these interruptions were probably necessary. I was told afterward that the finale had gone well at the dress rehearsal, and that may be what we’ll hear on the eventual recording. It was certainly not a satisfying conclusion for the Monadnock audience, though it was good to get a fresh glimpse of this seldom-played masterpiece.
NO SOLO BOWS: And Gustavo Dudamel never upstaged Imogen Cooper. |
Just two days before the end of the Tanglewood season, there was a smashing BSO debut. Gustavo Dudamel is the dynamic, curly-topped 25-year-old Venezuelan conductor who grew up in that country’s state-supported music-education program, which is not only saving lives but producing superb musicians. (The youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic is a 19-year-old bass player from the same system.) Six years ago, he became the director of Venezuela’s top student ensemble, the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra. Now, he has an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and his first recording — Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies — is about to be released.Dudamel led off with the Overture to Bernstein’s Candide, a whirlwind of breathtaking sweep, speed, and intricately pointed musical detail, full of quicksilver shifts in pace and tone. In the part of the overture that quotes Candide’s ironic love duet with Cunegonde, “Oh Happy We,” you could actually hear two overlapping voices.
On the podium, Dudamel, who is quite small, is a mover and a shaker. But unlike some famous podium exhibitionists, he seems to have the music coursing through his veins. Every gesture is generated by the score and goes directly to the players. In the two pieces that followed, Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, with British virtuoso Imogen Cooper, and (more ballet music!) Manuel de Falla’s complete Three-Cornered Hat, which has two brief Spanish songs that were sung by voluptuous 24-year-old New York mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard (still in the graduate program at Juilliard), he never took a solo bow.
