Orchestra plays Britten, Strauss and Mahler

Reviewers are often criticized for commenting on the clothes worn by women musicians, and I have avoided all such references, out of principle as well as a desire to avoid unnecessary controversy. But the women musicians have attracted such comment because, after all, they’ve had some freedom to choose for themselves, while the men have traditionally been confined to formal evening wear.

That tradition seems to be changing. For the Philadelphia Orchestra’s latest subscription concerts, Yannick Nézet-Séguin opted for a dark jacket with an open-collared shirt, rather than white tie and tails. The soloist for the evening, oboist Richard Woodhams, took the stage in a tailored blue shirt, worn outside his pants.

The standard male orchestral outfit enjoys the great advantage of fading into the background without creating a distraction. Unfortunately, it’s beginning to look odd; musicians are about the only people left who wear formal evening dress.

Learning from Tempesta

I’m not sure Woodhams’s shirttails represent the best solution to this dilemma, but his musicianship overcame any distractions it might have caused— after an initial flurry in the audience when he strode out of the wings.

To me, that shirt represents something more important than a change in fashion. It symbolizes a change in attitude— an understanding that the Orchestra must experiment and adapt.

When the Orchestra first started suffering financial problems, I felt it could benefit from the example of Philadelphia’s smaller musical organizations, like Tempesta di Mare and Lyric Fest. The smaller organizations couldn’t coast along on the decades of good will and habit that the Orchestra had accumulated. Their musicians and their leaders knew that they had to play every concert as if it was their last chance to convince the audience it should buy tickets for their next event.

Not the whole story

Woodhams played the solo role in the oboe concerto that Richard Strauss wrote near the end of his life, at the suggestion of a young American soldier, John de Lancie, who became the principal oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The concerto is a contemplative, elegant piece of pure music, with none of the extra-musical associations Strauss fastened on his orchestral “tone poems,” and the audience got to hear one of the world’s leading oboists playing a long, graceful line, with no breaks between movements.

Yannick could have toned down the sections in which the orchestra plays full blast, but he gave Woodhams a controlled, well-balanced accompaniment in the sections that spotlight the soloist.

The other items on the program— Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell— are both exercises in orchestration, and Yannick led a performance that showed off the Orchestra and both composers’ genius for mixing tone colors. But a commentary limited to the concert's musical aspects would miss the real story.

Yannick’s best shot

The real story is the sense of engagement that ran through the whole concert. You can argue about some of Yannick’s choices, but you know he’s always thinking about what he’s doing and giving it his best shot.

The Orchestra’s bankruptcy warned Philadelphia’s movers and shakers that they can’t take its existence for granted, and the entire organization has obviously heard the warning. Routine evenings are no longer acceptable. Support is available but it must be earned, concert-by-concert, bar by bar.

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And now, the critics

But what should critics wear?

On Sunday afternoon, I trekked to Chestnut Hill to hear Tempesta di Mare and discovered the critic for the Chestnut Hill Local, Michael Caruso, had reached the same conclusion I had. It was too hot and humid for a jacket, but a short-sleeved shirt conflicted with the dignity of the art we chronicle. Both of us independently decided that a long-sleeved shirt offered the best compromise between comfort and respectful decorum.

In the absence of a BSR dress code, that will have to serve as the best-informed judgment currently available.