Welser-Möst指揮Cleveland 管のUSツアー

この音楽評の副題が From a Pizza Shop to Carnegie Hall と破天荒だったので取り上げました．

ご存知の通り，今年のアメリカは中西部から東部にかけて吹雪，豪雪に見舞われて，空路も大変なようです．Cleveland Orchestra は，2週間のアメリカ国内ツアーが雪に阻まれて，困難を極めたのですが．まず，started with a three-day residency at Indiana University　で大雪に悩まされて，そこから脱出して温暖なフロリダで演奏会を開き，再び大雪のシカゴに向かったのですが，雪に阻まれてミシガン州の Ann Arbor で飛行機が泊まってしまい，シカゴをキャンセルする羽目になり，そこで ミシガン大学の学生達と混じって，Pizza Shop で小コンサートを開いたそうです．

the orchestra members joined the local chapter of The Classical Revolution, which plays chamber music every Wednesday night.　 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　three basses played an arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Vocalise, and other orchestra musicians performed the eloquent sounds of Mozart's horn quartet. World-renowned pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who performs with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall this weekend, played Brahms　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　といいますから，なかなかのコンサートです．

私の個人的な大雪経験を書きますと，Boston に住んでいた私がテキサス大学のお招きでテキサス州の州都オースティンに向かったのですが，その日はアメリカ全体が大雪で，乗り換えたニューヨーク空港で飛行機の雪かきをやって滑走路に出ようと待機している間にもう翼に雪が溜まって，2度目の雪かきをやって，それからようやくオースティンに向けて飛び立ったのですが，途中で，操縦士が国内で許される飛行時間を超えてしまうからと，ニューオーリンズに降りてしまったのです．　　　　　　　　　やむなくジャズのメッカ，ニューオーリンズで一泊して，翌日は直行便がなくって，一旦ヒューストンに飛んで，そこで乗り換えてオースティンに，なんと東京に飛ぶより長い26時間かけてやっと到着した記憶があります．

余談が長くなりましたが，この音楽評は Ann Arbor からNew York に飛んで，Carnegie Hall でやった2公演をまとめて取り上げたモノです．

それは一口で言うと，the Carnegie concerts were notable for their restraint　に尽きます．　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　プログラムは，　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Debussy’s atmospheric “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,”　　
Toshio Hosokawa’s “Woven Dreams,”　
Strauss’s “Heldenleben” (“Hero’s Life”) 　
as an encore; “Träumerei am Kamin” from Strauss’s opera “Intermezzo.” 
以上，Friday Concert

Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” Overture                                                       Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor with Pierre-Laurent Aimard                Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.                                      no encore

総体として，the performance was superb. Joela Jones, the pianist; Paul Yancich, the timpanist; and Richard Weiner, the principal percussionist, gave strong performances, and Stephen Rose, the principal second violinist, made fine, evocative work of the weird slides in the Adagio. After this performance, as after the others, Mr. Welser-Möst dismounted from the podium quickly and took the applause from the stage floor with the players.

No successful conductor lacks ego, but Mr. Welser-Möst makes remarkably little show of it. The word restraint keeps coming to mind: a restraint that, in manner, can make him seem boyishly appealing if sometimes inscrutable; a restraint that, musically, can serve him so well in, say, taming the bluster of Bruckner but hardly at all, in my experience, in summoning the demons of Mahler.

と，指揮者，音楽監督のWelser-Möst （ウイーン国立オペラ音楽監督兼任）を　restraint の人だと評して， a restraint that, musically, can serve him so well in, say, taming the bluster of Bruckner but hardly at all, in my experience, in summoning the demons of Mahler.　　
と，Bruckner には抑制が向いているかも知れないが，Mahler の　demons には向かないのではと評しています．

昨年，彼が Vienna Phil と Cleveland Orchestra を指揮した東京公演を聴いた私の感想も，きわめてこれに近かったことを想起しましたが，派手にオケを鳴らすのが主流の現代のクラシック界にあって，なかなかの逸材だとも考えるモノです．

 

 

Music Review

Orchestral Extremes: From a Pizza Shop to Carnegie Hall

Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The Cleveland Orchestra, led by Franz Welser-Möst, playing the second of two weekend concerts at Carnegie Hall.

By JAMES R. OESTREICH

Published: February 6, 2011

The Cleveland Orchestra must have been champing at the bit when it arrived at Carnegie Hall on Friday evening for the first of two concerts that, along with a finale in Newark on Sunday, would end a two-week American tour. The players and their music director, Franz Welser-Möst, started with a three-day residency at Indiana University, then escaped the Midwestern snows for balmy Florida, only to plunge back into the blizzards. Instead of moving on to Chicago, where they were to have performed in the venerable Symphony Center on Wednesday, they remained stranded in Ann Arbor, Mich., where several of the players joined a jam session in a pizza joint.

Yet the Carnegie concerts were notable for their restraint. The Friday program opened with Debussy’s atmospheric “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” with the insinuating flute solo gorgeously played by Joshua Smith. Then came Toshio Hosokawa’s “Woven Dreams,” commissioned by the orchestra, Carnegie Hall and the Lucerne Festival.

This work is the very definition of restraint, inspired, Mr. Hosokawa, 55, writes, by “a dream that I was in my mother’s womb.” Accordingly, the music is static and subdued, based on a simple melody and its organic growth into a more complex form. But not much more complex: the music remains innocuous and uneventful until the surge of the climactic event, what Mr. Hosokawa calls “the exit.”

Mere hours later it was hard to remember much about the music, though, in fairness, part of what obliterated it was a resounding performance of Strauss’s “Heldenleben” (“Hero’s Life”) after intermission. Here the wraps were finally off.

The orchestra gloried in the work’s brilliant and kaleidoscopic sonorities and produced powerful heft, with shining woodwinds and brasses, without letting the sound turn blowsy. William Preucil, the concertmaster, performed the violin solos beautifully as well as playing an obvious role in keeping the whole spectacle together. Not that Mr. Welser-Möst needed much help with a band clearly responsive to his every gesture.

But unlike many another conductor, Mr. Welser-Möst never seemed — to paraphrase Carly Simon — to think this song was about him. Strauss’s hero was Strauss, not the conductor, and Mr. Welser-Möst seemed content to put the brush strokes assiduously in place as the grand canvas unfolded.

Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” Overture, which opened the concert on Saturday, had much the same feel. Again the playing was brilliant, especially in the strings, with fluid cascades and incandescent tremolos. Mr. Welser-Möst’s detailed care for dynamic shadings was reflected in playing of mercurial shifts and subtleties.

A Wagner recording by Mr. Welser-Möst, the orchestra and the soprano Measha Brueggergosman, released last year by Deutsche Grammophon, seemed oddly lightweight and uninvolved. There was no such problem here.

Then this program reversed the order of the previous night, moving from grandiosity to restraint. Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor is not a work that flaunts virtuosity on the part of either soloist or orchestra. But it does reward it, and the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s contribution was an ideal fit with the Cleveland ethic. Without being at all flamboyant and despite some finger slips, his playing projected an understated brilliance well matched by the orchestra’s.

The program ended unconventionally, with a work for a sharply reduced orchestra, Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. What kind of conductor wouldn’t want to end a tour stand in a blaze of woodwinds and brasses? And what kind of encore can you do without them? (There was none; the encore on Friday was the “Träumerei am Kamin” from Strauss’s opera “Intermezzo.”)

Be that as it may, the performance was superb. Joela Jones, the pianist; Paul Yancich, the timpanist; and Richard Weiner, the principal percussionist, gave strong performances, and Stephen Rose, the principal second violinist, made fine, evocative work of the weird slides in the Adagio. After this performance, as after the others, Mr. Welser-Möst dismounted from the podium quickly and took the applause from the stage floor with the players.

No successful conductor lacks ego, but Mr. Welser-Möst makes remarkably little show of it. The word restraint keeps coming to mind: a restraint that, in manner, can make him seem boyishly appealing if sometimes inscrutable; a restraint that, musically, can serve him so well in, say, taming the bluster of Bruckner but hardly at all, in my experience, in summoning the demons of Mahler.

Here, for two evenings, it seemed just the ticket.