When Critics Agree
by Sedgwick Clark
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out Alex Ross’s “Orchestral comparisons at Carnegie Hall” in his latest New Yorker column (3/22/10). He mentions ten concerts, nearly all of which I heard too, and singles out the Minnesota Orchestra concert conducted by Osmo Vänskä that I wrote about in this space on March 3rd. It’s always gratifying when a colleague one respects agrees with you, especially when you both think the concert was one of the best you’ve ever heard. On his blog two days ago, Alex announced the topic of his New Yorker piece and quoted an approving sentence from my blog about the concert. “Turnabout is fair play,” declared the old Vox budget LP label, and I trust he won’t mind my quoting his ultimate judgment on the concert: “For the duration of the evening of March 1st, the Minnesota Orchestra sounded, to my years, like the greatest orchestra in the world.”
Vänskä was Musical America‘s Conductor of the Year in 2005. In accepting the award he said that the orchestra had charged him with making the Minnesotans the finest orchestra in the world. When I reminded him of that backstage after the concert on March 1st, he smiled broadly and said, “We’re getting there, aren’t we?” An increasing number of people agree.
Bernstein’s Haydn
The first piece I ever heard Leonard Bernstein conduct live, at a New York Philharmonic concert in fall 1968, was Haydn’s Symphony No. 87. I hung on every note. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Fischer-Dieskau and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, which followed, were no less compelling. A brand new New Yorker, fresh out of college, I attended all the Bernstein concerts I could afford on $100 a week ($76.90 after taxes), and never missed a Haydn performance. A few months ago Sony performed a major service by putting all of Bernstein’s Haydn recordings for the Columbia label into a 12-CD bargain box for $72—its most important release since its complete Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky recordings on 22 CDs for $45. Sampling this rerelease in light of today’s authentic-performance movement has only reaffirmed my affection for his warm, witty, expressive renderings of this endlessly inventive and most human of composers. One can pick at certain tempos, such as his mawkish Trio in the Menuetto of the 96th, but the rest of the performance is delightful. It is Bernstein’s Haydn that I always take from my shelf for enjoyment.
It’s too bad that Bernstein recorded only three Haydn symphonies in his late, Deutsche Grammophon years: Nos. 88, 92 (“Oxford”), and 94 (“Surprise”)—superb readings all, and with the Vienna Philharmonic to boot. Interestingly, the latter’s second-movement Andante is fully a minute faster than his 1970s Adagio-like New York performance, and the “surprise” chord is a much quicker attack than the heavy, spread chord on that earlier rendition. A nod to authenticity? Only No. 92 was new to his discography, and it’s become a special favorite: relaxed, abounding with puckish details—perfect to wake up to, but, then, perfect at any time of day.
In reviewing the conductor’s first disc of the “Paris” symphonies in 1964, the late Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon wrote in High Fidelity magazine that “Leonard Bernstein is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, interpreters of Haydn’s music we have today, either here or in Europe.” His judgment stands.
Sondheim and the Phil
I had hoped to report on the New York Philharmonic’s 80th-birthday tribute to Stephen Sondheim last night (3/16/10), but I had to skip it at the last minute. Sondheim was Musical America‘s Composer of the Year ten years ago, the first non-classical artist to be honored by this pub. MA.com’s editor, Susan Elliott, an ardent musical-theater fan, e-mailed me close to midnight, “I’m SOO sorry you missed it. It was amazing.” Susan was working at RCA when the label recorded the Phil’s extraordinary live performances of Sondheim’s Follies in 1985. She knows of what she speaks. Then, as now, the Phil pulled out all the stops in getting a star cast (Lee Remick for the original cast’s Alexis Smith!). And Tom Shepard, who produced so many Sondheim show albums for Columbia and RCA, commandeered the whole shebang superbly. If you don’t have this recording, your show collection is not complete. Fortunately, we can look forward to a PBS amalgam of the two 80th-birthday performances in the near future. You can get the necessary details in Stephen Holden’s Times review this morning. He calls Monday’s concert “thrilling,” and I, for one, can’t wait.