The end of the Orchestra?

My decision to move north to Philadelphia 24 years ago was prompted by three principal considerations: (1) a better-paying job; (2) my desire to experience changing seasons again; and (3) the opportunity to hear one of the world's great orchestras on a regular basis.

I can't complain about my job, or about the weather. They are what they are. I expected that the Philadelphia Orchestra would remain what it was, too. Until now, it has. I am afraid this may not be the case much longer.

The terms to which the Orchestra's musicians have now yielded under threat of bankruptcy seem a formula for decline. On top of their previous concessions, the musicians have agreed to pay cuts that will leave them about 25% less well compensated than their colleagues in comparable orchestras. They will shift to a defined contribution pension plan that will leave them less secure in retirement.

Also, ten positions will be cut. Fortunately, that's still enough to play Mozart and Beethoven. Too bad about Bruckner and Mahler, though.

Civic failure

There's no guarantee that this will be the last or worst of the retrenchments. It's quite certain, however, that more of the Orchestra's best musicians will leave than would otherwise be the case, and that it will be harder, if not impossible, to recruit replacements of comparable quality.

A great city is defined by a great orchestra. Philadelphia hasn't been a great city in a long while, but it has had a great orchestra. Now, it seems, Philadelphia is in the process of bringing the Orchestra down to its own level.

These sentiments occupied me as I attended the past week's concert. No chairs onstage are yet empty. No more first desk players have yet departed. The musicians weren't smiling, but they played as beautifully as ever. The music compelled them. Pride compels them. A hundred-year tradition compels them.

Let's enjoy it while we can.

Lang Lang's gimmickry

Maestro Charles Dutoit opened the program with Faure's Pavane, which the Orchestra performed as if it were an elegy for itself. The mood if not the tempo picked up with Lang Lang's reading of the Liszt First Piano Concerto, performed in honor of the bicentennial of the composer's birth.

Lang has often proved that he can do almost anything he likes with a keyboard and can mine the most exquisite effects from it when he's so minded. The Thursday evening performance was no exception. What Lang hasn't demonstrated, at least to this listener, is that he can pull his bag of tricks into an honest and coherent account of the music he plays.

He treats every unaccompanied passage as if it were a cadenza, letting the orchestra hang on his pleasure. In he process he mugs for his audience, lest anyone doubt that his virtuosity is the raison d'être of all else.

Liszt the showman might well have appreciated this effrontery; Liszt the composer— who worked over this concerto for more than 20 years before pronouncing it finished— would probably have liked to hear his music.

Soviet composer's quandary

The program's second half offered Shostakovich's epic Tenth Symphony, a work many consider his finest. Shostakovich had produced three symphonies during and in the immediate aftermath of the Great Patriotic War (as Russians were long taught to describe World War II). His Seventh and Eighth symphonies were large-scale works clearly imbued with the suffering of the war, though hardly reducible to that alone.

When a Ninth Symphony was announced in 1945, it was presumed that Shostakovich would complete his war trilogy with a work of comparable scope that, while of course tragic in cast, would end in affirmation. What emerged instead was a symphony of Haydnesque proportions that seemed almost to parody the portentous grandeur of its immediate predecessors, and ended in a burst of spirits.

Eight years of silence followed, the longest interval of Shostakovich's symphonic career. During this period Stalinism returned with as heavy if not quite as murderous a hand as ever, and Shostakovich was forced to produce potboilers while keeping his serious work from public view.

Not until Stalin's death in March 1953 did Shostakovich essay a new symphony: the Tenth, which premiered late that year. It nonplussed the authorities, who weren't yet ready for artistic candor.

Orwellian formula

A three-day congress of musicians held to assess the alleged ideological shortcomings of the Tenth finally came up with the Orwellian formula of "optimistic tragedy" to describe it. What it really is, I've come to think, is the final "war" symphony that the Ninth was not, but one concerned with the entire disaster of a nation ground between the millstones of Stalin and Hitler.

I've lived with this music a long time, but never before did I hear so clearly, in the anguished wind solos that punctuate the opening pages of the finale, the cries of the condemned in their subterranean cells— a music worthy of Dante's Inferno. But the Tenth is also an artistic self-portrait, employing for the first time the musical motto of Shostakovich's name— D, E-flat, C, B (DSCH in the German transliteration of his first initial and the first three letters of his last name)— that would often recur in later works, and ramming it home in the work's conclusion with the almost hysterical insistence of the survivor: I am! I am! I am!

Dutoit, whose Shostakovich has improved, led a steady, focused performance that let the music speak for itself, even if it didn't plumb its deepest recesses. The third movement— in many ways the pivot of the work— was particularly well done.

The Orchestra played responsively, winds and tympani especially. And for the space of nearly an hour, at least, the Orchestra's grim circumstances could be held in abeyance.

Acoustic tinkering

Verizon Hall has undergone some tinkering over the summer to enhance its acoustics. I discerned perhaps some marginal improvement in sound delivery, though of course it's what will be delivered that ultimately counts (about as much money was spent on bankruptcy proceedings as on sound renovation). But Verizon Hall will probably never get much better.

If you want to know what symphonic music can really sound like, you must go to Boston's Symphony Hall, or to have known the old Carnegie Hall before its soul was ripped out.

Perhaps, though, it is just as well for Philadelphians never to have known how fine an orchestra they have had.♦


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