We're going to come back to David Zinman again and again because... well.... if I'm a musician, and I suppose the jury is still out, he's the reason.
This video is one of the only true mementos of the orchestra whose concerts I grew up going to. I had no real idea how good I had it. People don't realize what a difference it was to grow up somewhere with a truly great orchestra, and what a weird little unicorn you become if nobody else was touched in the way you were. But the Meyerhoff in those years was a magical place in a magical era. Week after week of music making whose quality exceeded nearly anywhere else in America, under a conductor whom in those years was like an American Carlos Kleiber, volcanic passion and character under an iron frame of discipline. Only this conductor always showed up, conducted every corner of the repertoire, and tons of new music besides. And not only all that, but when Zinman turned around, he exceeded even Leonard Bernstein in his ability to communicate to an audience. He was just as articulate as Lenny, and a hundred times funnier. Eight weeks every year on Saturday morning at 11, Dad and I would sit in Row L 1 and 3, as Zinman created a series called 'Casual Concerts' which he modeled on Garrison Keillor and David Letterman.For a casual concert of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, he claimed to have discovered a tape of Tchaikovsky narrating his life into an audio-diary. For a concert of Brahms's First Symphony, he hired an actor to play Brahms on a psychiatrist's couch while Zinman played Sigmund Freud complete with a Viennese accent. For one Beethoven concert, he pretended to be Beethoven, still alive and a hobo in New York - condemned by the Devil to hear bad performances of his own music outside Carnegie Hall. And then there were the times he made the contrabassoon emit farting noises, and the time he literally played piano with his ass. For me, I'd always heard that classical music was stuffy, but growing up in 90s Baltimore, there was very very little sense that it could possibly be true.
And yet those early memories are virtually all I have of it. It's all just ephemera now, hardly any documentation of it all ever released to the public. The Zinman/BSO recordings of those years give you very little sense of just how electric this band was in live settings. They're perfectly good, but you'd never have much sense that what went on in Baltimore was any more extraordinary than a good second-tier American orchestra of those years like Cincinnati or Atlanta. Zinman is one of those musicians so disciplined that his music making does not have obvious distinguishing features, so the most extraordinary qualities of his performances can only be captured live. Mariss Jansons was the same way. People, including me, came out of Jansons performances as though they'd been through a literally awesome experience, but those who'd only heard him on recording have no idea what the big deal was. But at least Jansons got the recognition he deserved, and he spent the last fifteen years of his life as one of the world's three or four most feted conductors. Other once overlooked conductors in a similar age group like Charles Mackerras and Herbert Blomstedt finally saw their due in their final years.
David Zinman is nearly ten years older than Mariss Jansons, now in his mid 80's, and clearly suffering from something like Parkinson's. He is still a part-time guest conductor, an honored returnee at many of the world's best orchestras, but he can't possibly be the conductor he used to be. Look at his technique in this video, he is literally conveying hundreds of pieces of information to his players every minute with his body language as can only be done by an absolute master of the craft. Some conductors do miracles without much physical presence, but however small Zinman's 5'3 frame was, part of his power over orchestras was making them realize that however collegial, they were in the presence of a dynamo.
Rachmaninov's Second Symphony is not my favorite piece of music. Like Saint-Saens before him, and perhaps Mendelssohn and Liszt too, Rachmaninov was a musical genius to whom the craft of music came so easily that little room was left in his mental space to figure out what to say with his craft. Rachmaninov wrote a few original masterpieces, but the Second Symphony is not one of them. It is a perfect imitation of a symphony, perfectly orchestrated, and so perfectly constructed that I'm still discovering new formal relationships after decades of listening to it. But let's face it, it's simultaneously a work of genius and pretty insipid piece, and so long that the musical sugar can wear on the ear as very few pieces in the classical canon ever do. If I have a yen to listen, and I sometimes do, I need a Russian like Pletnev or Svetlanov who goes so far over the top that you never realize how bland this piece can get, playing it with raw Soviet brass and throbbing Russian string vibrato, and getting through the whole thing without cuts in fifty minutes. A slower performance (one that goes by Rachmaninov's tempi) is a very tough prospect. It becomes an hour of Hollywood film music at its most sentimental. So if you do this piece by the book, you need a real master up there to make it bearable: no mere Andre Previn, you need Rozhdestvensky or Ivan Fischer or Neeme Jarvi.
But un-Russian as this performance sounds, this Rachmaninov Second in Tokyo, done by my BSO on tour in 1994, is, like very few performances of this too often-performed warhorse, a performance that completely justifies its necessity, and displays a very rare mastery. Watch it and it shows what I knew in my bones then, that this was greatness. Zinman knew exactly what he was doing at every moment (a exceedingly rare quality among conductors...) and the orchestra responded to his every request (even rarer....). And if you just listen, you realize you're hearing an orchestra as good as it gets. One that doesn't just play the notes with precision and balance, but plays with that extra electricity which turns great skill into magic. This... is.... MUSIC! And this is now my sole memento of the organization that called me to music, and for the first time in twenty years, lets me relive that call.
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