DSO opens new season on adventurous note
Orchestras naturally like to open their seasons on a celebratory note, typically lining up a big-name soloist to play a crowd-pleasing concerto and programming a symphonic staple or two with an especially festive atmosphere.
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra certainly checked off those boxes on Friday night. French-born pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, a favorite among local audiences, was on hand to play George Gershwin’s jazzy Concerto in F, and the DSO, led by music director Leonard Slatkin, closed the evening with Richard Strauss’ “Suite from Der Rosenkavalier” in all its fleshy sumptuousness and whooping French horn glory. But it was what happened in between that was most rewarding and added musical and metaphoric weight to the start of Slatkin’s eighth season in Detroit.
Most symphonies eschew new music to open the season, and the appearance of a decades-old modernist score by a composer surely unfamiliar to all but a handful of aficionados in the audience is a true rarity. But here was Slatkin leading the DSO through Jacob Druckman’s “Mirage” (1976), a hefty 17-minute piece premiered 40 years ago by the St. Louis Symphony with a 32-year-old Slatkin on the podium. As it happens, the DSO played “Mirage” once before, at 1977 at Ford Auditorium with Slatkin guest conducting.
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Plopping “Mirage” smack dab in the middle of the program Friday sent an important message that exploration and contemporary music remain central to Slatkin’s vision. It’s also a reminder that despite the more conservative cast to the DSO’s midwinter festivals, including this season’s focus on Brahms, there’s also a lot of adventure in store for audiences in the coming months including a U.S. premiere by Nico Muhly and world premieres by Aaron Jay Kernis, Tod Machover, Mohammed Fairouz, DSO composer-in-residence Gabriela Lena Frank, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Slatkin himself. The docket also includes other American composers: William Bolcom, John Williams, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston and William Schuman.
Druckman (1928-1996) was once far better known than he is today. He was a key figure in the return-to-tonality movement of the 1970s and ‘80s. This was a period in which the aesthetic pendulum began swinging away from the severe, atonal (serial) music that followed World War II and that often gave audiences fits, toward a greater diversity of more immediately accessible styles. Composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich spearheaded a stripped down minimalism, while former serial composers like Druckman, George Rochberg, David Del Tredici and others reconnected with the past though more traditional melody and harmony, as well as directly quoting earlier composers.
Druckman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral score “Windows” in 1972 and was an important teacher, reached his highest public profile in the early ‘80s. As resident composer of the New York Philharmonic in those years he organized a series of influential Horizons Festivals that encapsulated what came to be called the New Romanticism. These days Druckman’s orchestral music doesn’t get much love. One reason might be that there’s little in his major scores from the ‘70s that sounds obviously melodic or romantic when compared to the easy-to-digest music and superficial genre-hopping that has so much currency these days.
“Mirage” was a potent reminder that while Druckman may have turned his back on serialism, he never, as critic Kyle Gann once put it, renounced modernism. “Mirage,” like the earlier “Windows,” is consistently abstract but impeccably crafted. There’s little by way of melody and steady rhythm. Instead, Druckman, who retained an ear for beauty and was a master of color and texture, builds a narrative through the contrast of fast and slow, dense and airy, dissonance and consonance, tension and release. “Mirage” is constructed as a dialogue between two ensembles: an onstage orchestra (including lots of percussion and two electronic keyboards) that plays darting, angular gestures that suggest Pollack-like splashes of paint; and a 22-member off-stage ensemble that responds with distant chords, slow moving passages and snippets from Debussy’s “Sirenes” and more that hover like apparitions along the horizon. I recall hearing a bit of Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” but in retrospect can’t place whether it came from on or off stage — a mirage, indeed.
The effect was mesmerizing Friday, as if Druckman was communing with the past — or memories of the past — without mortgaging his place in the present. The bubbling winds and muted brass squiggles eventually gave way to more expressly lyrical figures and the on and offstage ensembles slowly found common ground.
Slatkin led a confident performance: clear, sparkling, authoritative. The DSO players responded with focused, detailed playing of music that dies without 100 percent commitment up and down the line. Assistant conductor Michelle Merrill did fine work with the offstage ensemble.
Elsewhere, Slatkin and the DSO sounded like they were still getting reacquainted after a long summer vacation. The opening “Roman Carnival Overture” by Hector Berlioz was a high-energy but rather breathless sprint, and the closing “Der Rosenkavalier” was spirited but not always seamlessly executed. Still, Slatkin whipped up a lot of excitement in the big-tune waltzes, and an especially lovely duet passage by concertmaster Yoonshin Song and new principal oboist Alex Kinmonth, a fresh-minted Juilliard graduate who just turned 22, portends nothing but good things for the future. (The music by Strauss, also had a foreshadowing effect as the DSO will end its season next June performing a concert-version of Strauss’ brazen one-act opera “Salome.”)
Gershwin’s Concerto in F (1925) is a more formally ambitious work than the more loosely structured “Rhapsody in Blue,” but there are times in the opening and closing movements of the Concerto in which the peppy syncopations seem to chafe against the orchestra as if the symphonic clothing was just a little too tight. But the central adagio has an exalted melodic glow and bluesy imprint that make it one of Gershwin’s most memorable creations. Thibaudet was as charismatic soloist, bringing effervescent snap and easy if slightly rushed virtuosity to the outer movements and a lucid clarity to the slow movement. He earned his standing ovation, but the expected encore took a surprising and emotional turn.
Slatkin and Thibaudet offered a tribute the late DSO patron Helen Wu, performing the four-hand piano arrangement of the final movement from Ravel’s “Mother Goose Suite.” Helen Wu, who died in June, and her husband Clyde Wu have been among the DSO’s most loyal and generous patrons and the primary visionaries and financial supporters behind the orchestra’s expansive education programs, which rank with the finest of their kind in the country. Helen Wu was a force of nature, the kind of woman who could quietly re-arrange mountains in her spare time. She was also a fine pianist and would have adored the gesture of Slatkin and Thibaudet playing a duet. She’ll be missed.
Contact Mark Stryker: 313-222-6459 or mstryker@freepress.com
Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Three stars out of four stars
Friday night, Orchestra Hall, Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center