Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Underrated Classical Musicians 2/15/20



In a few minutes I'm driving up to Philadelphia to hear the Philly O perform Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortileges, one of my favorite pieces of music in the world. It will be conducted by one of the world's most underrated conductors who is about to become the director of the St. Louis Symphony. America has a lot of very good orchestras, and only a very few at any given time are great. My hometown orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, is a very good and underrated orchestra that fell on some hard times recently, but when I was growing up, it was a great orchestra. Right now, San Francisco and LA are great, Pittsburgh is great, Minnesota is great. Forget all the bigger names, that's about it. But in my opinion, the next place in America to get a great orchestra will be St. Louis.
About ten years ago I had breakfast with a Boston music critic (at least he was in Boston at the time), the Boston Symphony was in the middle of a huge crisis, and the search for a transformative young music director was on. I asked what was happening, and he told me that management wanted the now very famous Andris Nelsons, but while the orchestra liked Nelsons fine, the one they really wanted was Stephane Deneve.
When Andris Nelsons is on, he can be transcendent, but on the nights when he's not transcendent he can be dull indeed. Stephane Deneve may not scale Olympus in the same way, but I have never heard a performance of his that was less than first class, full of detail and insight.
Deneve has the unfortunate luck of being a potentially great conductor in a generation that teems with them, and is not particularly telegenic, so he will never be a huge star. I always thought Deneve was a French specialist, but this Mahler 5 is really something - completely idiomatic, with all sorts of dynamic shifts in different places than usual, and magnificent soft dynamics. If this is a foretaste of what Deneve is capable of in repertoire he's not yet known for, his partnership with the St. Louis Symphony will belong to the ages.

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