Nicola Luisotti leads the Orchestra

Normally, one doesn't review hand or stick technique: Conductors do what they have to do onstage to shape performances. The better rehearsed these are, the less podium activity should be required to bring them off.

Some conductors are hyperkinetic, a fashion introduced by Leonard Bernstein. At the other end of the spectrum, a Boston Symphony horn player once told me that Charles Munch was so sparing with his entrance cues that a player was lucky to get the flick of a finger or the flutter of an eyelash.

Count Nicola Luisotti, the Tuscan-born music director of the San Francisco Opera, is in the Bernstein camp. Luisotti didn't quite leave his feet onstage in his Philadelphia Orchestra debut, but his arms swung so widely and his hands waggled so feverishly that he easily could have been mistaken for the captain of an Italian cruise ship semaphoring distress signals to shore. Some of the campier versions of the Frankenstein and Dracula movies also came to mind.

These are not the images that should ideally accompany a performance of Bach.

Stokowski's travesty

Actually, though, it wasn't Bach he conducted but the infamous arrangement of the Chaconne from the second violin Partita, which was the ultimate lollipop of the Stokowski era. The great Chaconne had fascinated various 19th and early 20th Century composers, including Schumann, Brahms and Busoni, and Busoni's piano transcription remains an intriguing and technically challenging attempt to interpret Bach through late Romantic eyes.

Stokowski, though, was no composer, and his travesty piece simply draws the music out to an agonizing 20 minutes without adding a bar to its content— the audio equivalent of watching a fly's wings being slowly twisted off. Why anyone in this day and age would want to revive it is beyond comprehension, but then this is the new Philadelphia Orchestra, whose management, having wrecked its finances, hopes to win back customers with an appeal to the good old 1930s.

(It might be remembered, as my BSR colleague Steve Cohen has recently noted, that Stokowski also parted company with the Orchestra in part because management discouraged his performance of new music.)

Shostakovich silenced

A work of far greater substance followed: the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto. The concerto was the only purely orchestral work Shostakovich completed between 1945 and 1953, other than film music. He wrote it in 1947-48 but, apart from a private performance in a piano reduction by Shostakovich for its dedicatee, David Oistrakh, it received no hearing until 1955.

The reason for this long hiatus was the sweeping condemnation of so-called "formalist" deviation in the work of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and others at the 1948 Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers. For Shostakovich, this was a repeat performance of the 1936 attack on his long-running opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which had put him in serious jeopardy of his life.

The fact that Shostakovich had company in misery among his fellow composers this time around would only have signified the onset of a new Great Purge such as had wiped out the intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad a decade earlier. Only with Stalin's death in 1953— and a post-Stalin debate in the Composers' Union about the ideological merits of his Tenth Symphony— did Shostakovich feel free (or at any rate relatively safe) to risk public exposure of the Violin Concerto.

It was published as Op. 99 and— such was the state of Soviet musicology in the West— was for a long time assumed to have been a product of the mid-1950s. No one appeared to notice that Shostakovich had left Op. 77 empty in his catalogue of compositions, but eventually the work was assigned its proper opus number.

You will notice that a very substantial portion of Soviet orchestral repertoire is missing from the years 1948-53, or is camouflaged in patriotic cantatas or tone poems: Such was Stalin's final legacy to the arts.

Like Olivier playing Shakespeare

Oistrakh described the violin part of this concerto as a "Shakespearean role" for its intensity and depth. He played it that way, Olivier-style, and although a number of capable readings have been performed since, no one has ever projected the score with comparable authority and command. (Performers of the Shostakovich cello concertos have the same problem with Msistlav Rostropovich, who similarly owned these works.)

The veteran Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has had the Violin Concerto in her repertory for some time, but it gave her a tussle in the Thursday performance I attended.

The opening Nocturne is a dark, ruminative meditation in which the violin, after the opening bars, has a virtually unbroken soliloquy. This isn't loud but very focused playing, and it simply wasn't projected from where I sat. I thought poor miking might have been a factor, but friends elsewhere in the hall told me they had the same difficulty.

In the whirlwind Scherzo that followed, the soloist must either seize the music or be swamped by it, and Salerno-Sonnenberg never quite got on her saddle (she and the Orchestra seemed briefly out of sync as well).

Lost in the passagework

The heart of the work lies in the long Andante, a passacaglia in which the orchestra opens with stark, simple chords that seem to point ahead to late Shostakovich— his Michelangelo Suite, Op. 146 for example— but gradually thins out to silence as the soloist takes on a long cadenza—soliloquy of soliloquies—of formidable technical and artistic difficulty. Salerno-Sonnenberg held the audience here, but her tendency to clip certain notes undermined, for me, some of the musical continuity.

The cadenza breaks off abruptly as the music proceeds without pause into a carnivalesque finale in which the soloist must again contend with an energetic orchestra. Here, too, Salerno-Sonnenberg's passagework was occasionally lost.

Maestro Luisotti's accompaniment was not intrusive, and he happily kept his feet together and his movements crisp in his supportive role. But he resumed his gyrations with the concluding work of the program, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Kim's mini-concerto

This is another Philadelphia chestnut, recorded seven times by the Orchestra and performed only two seasons back under Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos. The work's content is so familiar that one best approaches it by listening for detail, and surely Rimsky's orchestration is brilliant. Soloists were in good form throughout, and concertmaster David Kim played the violin recitative— almost a mini-concerto in itself— with taste and sensitivity.

This is a work in which an Orchestra with other matters on its mind and an unfamiliar conductor on the podium might have settled for a rote performance, but no one was phoning it in this evening. That's good news at least.♦


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