Rattle and Hannigan with the Philadelphia Orchestra (3rd review)

The big news about last weekend's Philadelphia Orchestra concerts wasn't what I expected.

Beethoven's Sixth Symphony provided the most satisfaction, rather than the shock music that occupied the first three-quarters of the program.

Simon Rattle led a performance of the Pastorale that stressed what was radical about this symphony. Uniquely, Beethoven here wrote about a specific place: his beloved fields and woods along the Danube River near Vienna. The piece, he wrote, is "more the expression of feeling than painting." Accordingly, he labeled specific sections such as "Scene at the brook," "Happy gathering of country folk" and "Shepherd's song."

Rattle's interpretation stressed Beethoven's explicit program: You could hear the cuckoo, the meandering stream and the rustling of wind in the trees. The composer's solid classical structure wasn't neglected, yet it served as an underpinning rather than front and center.

Stokowski objected

Whereas other performances of the Pastoral take about 40 minutes, this variation lasted 45. Rattle observed all of the indicated repeats, bringing lovely, differentiating details to each reappearance. The woodwind and horn solos by the first chairs were ecstatic. Much of the tutti playing was of gossamer softness.

Rattle seemed to offer a rebuttal to the Orchestra's famous 1940 performance of this same work under Leopold Stokowski in Walt Disney's Fantasia. Disney's animators shifted the scene from Beethoven's Austrian countryside to mythological Greece, where they pictured centaurs, cupids and fauns and Zeus throwing lightning bolts.

Originally, that spot in Fantasia was intended for a suite from Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied, a ballet about fauns by Gabriel Pierné. Stokowski and Disney abandoned that music, but Walt had too much time and money invested in Cydalise's fauns, so he transferred those images to Beethoven's Pastorale. To his credit, Stokowski objected to the switch.

"I'm only a musician," Stokowski argued at a story meeting in January 1939, "but I think what you have there, the idea of mythology, is not quite my idea of what this symphony is about. This is a nature symphony. It's called Pastorale. If you're going to leave out the trees and nature, you're going to leave out what it is."

Facebook dreamers

Ollie Johnston, one of the revered "nine old men" of animation, told me, "Some people were so upset by what we did that they said they'd never be able to listen to Beethoven again. But we knew we could reach a whole generation who would never have heard this music in the first place."

And today on Facebook and YouTube you can read comments like "This is by far my favorite segment of the movie. It just makes me feel like dreams can come true." At the talks I gave before each performance this past weekend, many people in the audience said they'll always associate this music with the Fantasia imagery.

Earlier in last weekend's program we heard moving renditions of avant-garde works introduced to America by Stokowski and the Philadelphians. (Each of the disparate works on the program had some link to Stokowski.)

Hissed in '27

Webern's Passacaglia, which was hissed at its first U.S. performance in 1927, sounded beautiful this time around. Three fragments from Berg's Wozzeck, now acknowledged as a classic, were powerfully projected by the Orchestra. Barbara Hannigan sang sensitively as Wozzeck's mistress Marie as well as, at the end, the lines of the child left behind after Wozzeck murders Marie and drowns himself in a pool while trying to wash Marie's blood from his knife.

Contrary to Robert Zaller's remark that Hannigan "seemed insufficiently miked at times," she had no amplification whatsoever. A microphone was on stage, but only for recording purposes.

A scene for soprano and orchestra excerpted from Ligeti's opera Le Grand Macabre is a specialty of Hannigan and Rattle. Their outlandish act, with Hannigan dressed as a dominatrix, brought a standing ovation. If you listened beyond the shtick you heard spectacularly accurate projection of staccato high notes that spoofed the excesses of coloratura opera.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Peter Burwasser, click here.