Vienna Philharmonic at Verizon Hall (1st review)

The Vienna Philharmonic made its first visit to Philadelphia in six years at the Kimmel Center on Tuesday night. Bombay-born Zubin Mehta, who hasn't been seen here in a dozen years, conducted (that's Mumbai, if you're being up-to-date about it, but the program notes still say "Bombay"), and Beijing (plus Curtis)-trained Lang Lang performed the Chopin Second Concerto.

Like all well-drilled European orchestras, the Vienna's musicians marched onstage en bloc, not sauntering in and tuning up individually as American orchestras do. There's a message being sent: This is a unit, not a set of individuals.

The Vienna also sends a message of another sort, too: No girls allowed, or hardly any: The ensemble, long exclusively a male preserve, still sports only a couple of token females.

Does it matter? Not, at any rate, to the music-making. From the first bars of the curtain-raiser, Wagner's Rienzi Overture, the Vienna showed why it is in a class by itself. This is no mere ensemble, but an organism that seems to produce its sound as if from a single instrument, and unrolls its music like a seamless bolt of cloth. Everything is so fully unified and coherent that it seems superfluous to single out particular sections, as Mehta did finally in acknowledging the winds after the evening's concluding work, the Schubert Ninth Symphony.

Overcoming Verizon's acoustics

Not in the least to disparage our local orchestra, which apparently received a warm reception of its own when it performed recently in the Austrian capital, but the Vienna Philharmonic is, simply, a world treasure, and even Verizon's acoustics couldn't keep it from sounding like it.

Some conductors can't resist tinkering with the Vienna; Leonard Bernstein comes to mind. Maestro Mehta, who in his 70s now resembles one of the lamech figures from the Palace of Nineveh, was (wisely) content to put the orchestra through its paces with no particular interpretive gloss of his own.

The phenomenally gifted Lang Lang, however, was another story. Lang, as is well known, sometimes appears to orbit a planet of his own. What he did was frequently magnificent, but not always Chopin. Notes scurried and scampered under his fingers like particles in a cloud chamber, always finely sounded but not always to expressive effect.

The orchestra accompanied him with a flexibility and nuance that kept the score going even when Lang was worrying it the most. The audience seemed divided about the result: Half stood to give Lang an ovation; the other half remained firmly seated. Your reviewer was among the latter.

Schubert's riddle

Of all the great symphonic composers cut off in their prime, Schubert leaves the most riddling of questions. The ninth symphonies of Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler all have a climactic quality; each plants a foot in silence, but a foot forward. In Schubert, it's the two-movement Eighth Symphony ("unfinished" only for fools who fail to see its perfect dramatic symmetry) that looks ahead to the Romantic symphony— is, indeed, its first fully realized specimen.

The Ninth, on the other hand, although it picks up the legacy of Beethoven and is really inconceivable without him, looks backward to the Classical tradition, and is best seen as its final, culminating gesture. It's almost as though Schubert, in offering these two works, was putting forward different models for the road the European symphony could take in the second quarter of the 19th Century. Although Classicism was to prove the road not taken, the Schubert Ninth shows it still to have been viable— although perhaps only in the hands of Schubert himself.

The word is "'heavenly'

Despite the enthusiasm of Schumann, Mendelssohn and Berlioz for the score (Schubert never heard it performed himself), most 19th- and even early 20th-Century audiences found it rebarbative: too long, too repetitive, too flagged by the rhythmic motifs that sustain its grand architecture. Bruckner, for one, certainly learned from the latter feature, and much 20th-Century music incorporated it. Perhaps in that sense its prophetic power may now be regarded as vindicated.

Take the Schubert Ninth as you will, it has the sublime monumentality of a work that never quite fit its age, yet without which the tradition of the Viennese symphony as it ultimately played out is hardly imaginable. The Vienna Philharmonic obviously has this music in its blood, and seemed scarcely to need Mehta's vigorous but tactful handling. Schumann spoke admiringly of its "heavenly length," and if anyone should encounter the score in the afterlife, it won't sound better than it did last week on our own metropolitan earth.



To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.