Lupu and Yannick at the Kimmel (2nd review)

The Moldau is the best known of the suite of tone poems that comprise Smetana’s orchestral masterwork, Má Vlast (My Country). Nationalism is more than a bit suspect in our day, at least ideologically, but Ma Vlast offers particularly strong testimony to the imaginative hold it enjoyed in the 19th century, particularly among groups still seeking nationhood. Smetana’s great cycle remains a testimony to the artistic ferment stirred by the nationalist ideal, just as two world wars (the first of which created Czechoslovakia) demonstrated the political anarchy that nationalism also helped to unleash.

Smetana’s cycle embraces geographical, historical, and legendary aspects of the Czech countryside. The Moldau— that’s German; in Czech it’s Vltava— is the Czech Republic’s longest river, cutting through Prague before emptying into the Elbe River— and symbolizing as does nothing else its natural power and fertility. Flutes introduce a flowing figure over lightly plucked strings, followed by the river’s full-throated theme. The music picks up a great castle, a peasant wedding, and a forest hunt, each a facet of the river’s majestic progress.

The only drawback of The Moldau is its excessive familiarity; we’ve all heard it to death. That makes a fresh performance all the more welcome, and the Orchestra played it with an admirable balance of delicacy and drive under Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Confused about Dvořák

Half a century ago, the state of Dvořák scholarship was in such disarray that four of the composer’s nine symphonies were not only missing from the repertory but also from catalogues of his work; thus, what is now (rightly) the Symphony #6 in D, Op. 60, was known as his Symphony #1. It’s still a relative rarity in concert, with his last three symphonies— formerly known as 2, 4, and 5— still receiving the lion’s share of performances. (Dvořák’s Third Symphony is now reckoned as his Fifth, although it still retains the opus number 76).

The result of this confusion is that Dvořák still hasn’t received his proper due as a symphonist. There’s a question of chronology involved, too. Dvořák’s first symphonies date from the early 1870s, and the last— the New World Symphony—from 1895. Thus his output overlaps that of Brahms, whose four symphonies were completed between 1876 and 1885 and substantially influenced Dvořák’s later essays in the form. These latter now also fall into the shade cast for us by Mahler’s first two symphonies (1888 and 1894) and Bruckner’s last three, not to mention the more general period influence of Wagner and Richard Strauss.

And there was the further problem: Dvořák, like Smetana, hailed from a country that didn’t yet exist on the map and represented a Slavic nationalism that was both politically and culturally repressed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which it was embedded. Middle-European artistic reputations were made in Berlin and Vienna, not in Prague.

All that said, the Sixth Symphony is a fresh and lovely work, full of melodic and orchestral invention, that holds attention through its 45-minute span. The third-movement Furiant, based on a Bohemian triple-meter dance form, bristles with energy; and the towering climax of the second-movement Adagio, which appears like a sudden storm on a summer day, is one of my favorite moments in all Dvořák. There’s a clear lineal descent here from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, but the music and feeling is all Dvořák’s own. Above all, though, there’s the presence of Smetana, and the sense of a nation being created in its music before being realized politically. Once again, the performance was first-rate.

Lupu after 40 years

Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was the last of the three great works of his final years, along with his Concerto for Orchestra and his unaccompanied Violin Sonata. Like the late works of Dmitri Shostakovich, they represent a triumph of will over time, since Bartók was fatally ill of leukemia and (again like Shostakovich) repeatedly hospitalized.

The Concerto was completed but for the orchestration of its last 17 bars, which was filled in by a colleague, Tibor Serly. There’s a strong connection to Beethoven’s G major Piano Concerto and A minor String Quartet in the Adagio religioso, with its deeply inward principal theme and the dialogue between piano and orchestra. Beethoven’s not a composer one associates with Bartók, but he was clearly on Bartók’s mind here, as Bach was for late Stravinsky.

The soloist was Radu Lupu, who made his first appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra some 40 years ago. He played crisply enough in the Concerto’s outer movements, but he took the Adagio spaciously and interrogatively, sifting the notes for each shade of meaning. Such an approach risks fragmentation in Bartók, but Lupu kept just enough control, and Nézet-Séguin followed him sympathetically.

A note to the Kimmel Center: I didn’t think the lobby could get more unfriendly to patrons, but where did the few seating spaces not connected to selling food and drink go?

To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.