"Peter and the Wolf" at the Mann

How to get kids to the Orchestra

TOM PURDOM

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s seventh concert at the Mann coupled a first-half children’s concert with a second half that featured one of the most adult works the 20th Century produced. Fortunately, the two pieces on the children’s program met the most important test of children’s art. Both were creations grownups can enjoy, too.

The headliner was Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, accompanied by the North American premiere of a new animated film. The film is a thoroughly modern piece of animation, with the 3-D look of video game images and some of the toughness of the more realistic games.

In this version, Peter is a lonely boy bullied by town toughs who throw him into a dumpster. When he returns as a triumphant hero, with the wolf in a cage, he flattens the chief bully and returns the wolf to the forest.

The wolf’s consumption of the goose receives a portrayal that I found startlingly graphic. But the film’s comic bits— such as Peter and the animals sliding on the ice— drew healthy Saturday cartoon laughter from the kids in the audience.

As I recall my one encounter with Peter and the Wolf in elementary school, Prokofiev’s musical tale is supposed to introduce children to the orchestra’s instruments. I didn’t think much of that idea when I was a kid, but it may have some validity when the score is paired with a narrator, as originally planned. The music can dominate the event when it’s only competing with a narrator. When it’s combined with a cartoon, it slips into the background.

If you feel children can’t achieve full adulthood without learning that an oboe can imitate a duck, you’d probably find this version less successful than a narrated performance. Judging by the reactions of the children around me, on the other hand, it may have accomplished something more important. The kids who liked it learned that a trip to the orchestra can be fun. On that foundation, properly cultivated, you can build a relationship that will last a lifetime.

Showing off the instruments

The other children’s item on the program, Benjamin Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell, put the music in the foreground. Under its alternate title, A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Britten’s piece was still another attempt to introduce kids to the different sections of the orchestra. It, too, achieves something much more valuable: It doesn’t just introduce the instruments, it shows them off. Like any good introduction, it offers some evidence that you’ll be glad you met your new acquaintance.

Britten didn’t limit his introduction to the livelier and brighter aspects of the orchestra’s emotional and aesthetic range. The trumpets and trombones do their thing, but Britten exposes his young listeners to the gentler and darker side of orchestral music, too. I’ve heard the Philadelphia Orchestra work its way through some perfunctory performances of this piece. This one captured all the shadings and moods the composer built into the score.

A stronger violin soloist

When I heard Midori play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto the previous week, I felt she needed a stronger tone. I didn’t have that problem when Elissa Lee Koljonen took on the final entry on the program, the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto. The Shostakovich worked better, in spite of the Mann’s size, because Shostakovich had a better feel for the limits of the solo instrument. In the Tchaikovsky, the violinist often has to play against the whole orchestra; in the Shostakovich, the soloist gets a (much-needed) rest whenever the orchestra delivers one of its infrequent blasts. In the rest of the concerto, the soloist usually plays against a background that contrasts with the violin and sets it off.

According to Paul Horsley’s program notes, the Soviet violinist who premiered the Shostakovich, David Oistrakh, compared it to a “Shakespearean role that demands from the artist the greatest emotional and intellectual dedication.” The concerto contains most of the breadth and range that composers normally pour into symphonies. It has four full movements, like a symphony, and each movement evokes one of the fundamental moods of our existence. Like much of Shostakovich’s best work, it’s a deeply personal statement by an artist who struggled with the psychological conflicts that batter creative personalities trapped in a totalitarian society. The last movement, for example, is a lively, traditional big climax but it is labeled “Burlesque” and colored with irony.

The best performance of this concerto I’ve heard featured Viktoria Mullova as the soloist. This performance by Koljonen belonged in the same class. It was so good that a review of the performance would essentially be a description of the concerto. The concerto is supposed to do quite a lot, and in Koljonen’s hands it did it all.