More or less around the time I began my blog break, I attended three concerts in Knoxville. There had also been hopes of an opera in NYC, but that fizzled, probably due more to my preferences than due to my friend's.
My mini music series was bookended by two concerts on the lighter end of music fare. First the Knoxville Symphony's pops concert, which was titled "A Celebration of Rogers and Hammerstein" on February 13th, and a week later, also on a Saturday evening, the Knoxville Choral Society performed a concert called "The people's voice" which focused on American songs, mixed between spirituals and folk songs. I've come to appreciate my pure enjoyment of these concerts, enjoyment in a particularly non-intellectual way, especially the concerts of the Symphony's Pops series. The guest artists are usually quite good and the music touches on a human aspect of shard experience and renders it into a kind of shared memory, a process of commonality and bonding. I find a joy in these performances, a balance perhaps, between the yearnings for something greater, the aesthetic, and the actuality of life, often touching, often tawdry, filled with sentiment and even the rather ironic touch of kitch. I don't mean this in a bad way, these things, are what makes us human, and popular music celebrates all of the many aspects of humanity. Music is more than art, it can also be memory, it can be yearnings. it can form bridges in ways words cannot.
In the midst of this popular upswelling was the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's February concert. This proved to be a much more problematic event from my perspective and my commentary is made far more difficult by the fact that I somehow stopped writing about concerts over the course of the previous months. This concert featured the fourth of the candidates for the position of the Knoxville Symphony's new music director, Eckart Preu.
I will just come right out and say that I did not enjoy this concert. I thought it was the worst concert I had heard this season, and I spent a considerable amount of time in the days following the concert trying to sort my reactions. I know I was tired. I don't know how much my tiredness affected my disappointment. I may never know. I can only explore my own reaction, and I only attended the second half. Several people who enjoyed the concert told me this was the "best half" which left me struggling with my own frustrations and inclinations, my own biases and joys, and where these various paths may be leading.
I missed the soloist. In retrospect I do not regret this, although I missed the first half of the concert because my plane was delayed rather than out of any intentional action on my part. It was, in fact probably good that I missed it. Based on the reviews, which I have since read, (generally far more positive toward the concert as a whole than my own opinion) and the fact that I have in fact heard Alon Godstein's recording of the Mozart Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 20 in D minor and found it lacking, I would probably have had difficulty being open-minded enough to appreciate that performance. Much as I love going to our symphony, and much as I have heard performances that have taken my breath away, I have also heard Uchida, Perraia, and Brendel peform this work, and I have several recordings of my favorites, each remarkably different. There are times that, despite my best intentions, I cannot completely divorce myself from expectation, and it would have been difficult for me to separate my disappointment in the soloist from the rest of the performance.
Here's the thing. I didn't think I remembered Eckart Preu, although I should have. I didn't remember him from his photo, I didn't remember him from his biography. Perhaps this should hae told me something in and of itself. But as a conductor, on the stage, I remember him. He has a rather distinctive style, and this is not a criticism. I remember Ekart Preu from the Bard Musical Festival, which I faithfully attended from its inception until I moved out of the area. I can't say I was thrilled with him then, although I certainly liked him better than Leon Botstein as a conductor (although I admire Botstein in many ways) which of course can explain how I had forgotten. Although he has grown musically, I still can't say that he would be my first choice, although I can see how his skills, and his focus, may be appealing to an orchestra in a small city which is doubtless trying to find some happy meeting point between the demands of a concert schedule and the costs incurred in producing it. Perhaps my expectations are not in line with where they should be. My intellectual side wants adventurous programming while my heart want magic. What I got on Friday February 19th was not magic. Oddly, the previous performances had been magical, especially the January concert with the young conductor Aram Demirjian, a concert that was unfortunately not well attended due to threats of bad weather.
I am admittedly spoiled. I attended the New York Philharmonic for over 25 years. I've heard heard other notable symphony orchestras, and many of the world's great soloists. But I've also heard boring performances in New York. And I've hard music that moved my soul in smaller venues. I've heard music that thrilled me, that brought me to tears, music which I can hear in the back of my mind in Knoxville. But I did not hear it that night.
What did I hear? I heard Jennifer Higdon's Blue Cathedral, a charming and evocative piece, which although fairly lightweight, can be both ethereal and emotionally moving, if not overdone by playing up its new romantic qualities, or underdone, by ascribing to it too much of a foreign, intellectualized zen-like quality. The latter was the problem with this performance, and Preu seemed to accent the "otherness" of this piece. To my mind the work seems to seek a balance between art (the zen-like qualities) and emotion (the more romantic impulses), but it is subtle and requires a delicate hand, a gentle teasing of the music. But perhaps this is where having heard a piece performed numerous times is a disadvantage. The orchestra itself performed well. I felt the interpretation was lacking, felt the music sounded like it was unfamiliar, and although the flute and clarinet solos were beautifully performed, the middle section of the work, which can sound like filler if not handled with the deftest touch, seemed like exactly that, filler. To my ears, the work felt more like an intellectual set piece, something that appealed more to the head than the heart.
The same measured quality, seemed to follow with the Prokofiev. It was as if the emphasis was more on the intellect, on tackling a challenge, rather than on finding the music. I felt Preu's rather expressive conducting style was not reflected in the actual music, which was more restrained, something that I found quite unsettling for excerpts from Romeo and Juliet. The performance was, in fact, of a piece with the performance of the Higdon: accenting the dissonance, in fact playing the contrasts well, something I had once found lacking in prior years. Normally this was something I would applaud, but I still felt that an idea of music was being painted, but not music itself. The performance seemed oddly devoid of joy and emotion. Ultimately, that is what I am looking for when I attend a concert. My brain wants to be engaged but my heart wants to sing.
I shall reiterate: perhaps my perceptions were shaped more by the fact that I was tired, and possibly easily disappointed. Yet I had been so eager to hear this concert. Every concert this year has surprised me. This was the first concert that surprise me in a not so good way. Perhaps, once again I am looking for something that is impossible. I don't expect the magic to happen every time. But the one time, the time that is an audition, that is important. It is important to me at least, but my opinion is but one among many, and I recognize that what is magic to me may not be magic to someone else, and vice versa. I am not trying to change the outcome. I am not always even comfortable writing about my disappointments, but how can one appreciate joy without accepting disappointment? Perhaps this was the wall I needed to climb before I could resume writing about my own, highly personal, reflections on music.
And now it is March. There will be more concerts. There will be another new conductor. Eventually a decision will be reached. Where will we go from here?
