I honestly wonder if my little hometown orchestra did not stumble into making the best complete Prokofiev R&J (V. Petrenko's new recording's pretty sweet too). I'd imagine I'd stand alone on this hill, but then again, I'm not a Prokofiev person on my best days. It's understated and melodic where other recordings paint capital letters in primary colors, but look at Prokofiev's score, listen to his recording of the second suite - the speeds are uniformly moderate, and while the sound may lie, the orchestral timbre seems more focused on melody than rhythm - which is doubly impressive given the rough timbre of most Soviet orchestras.
So to me, this 2016 recording is amazing in a way Maazel and Ozawa are not, but I was at the concert the same week this recording was made, and it was an absolute disaster. Not because of the orchestra, but because Marin Alsop thought it would be a nice idea to have the entire Shakespeare play declaimed as the music was going on. It was two and a half hours of torture - you couldn't hear either Shakespeare or Prokofiev. The weeks I bring friends to the BSO are almost inevitably the weeks they're not on their A-game. I often feel like the guy in the Chuck Jones cartoon who has a frog that doesn't perform in front of anybody but him... I'm not a flat-out Marin fan, but she's improved vastly over her tenure here, and she can at times light a bonfire. She's best known for conducting Bernstein and Copland, but the truth is that as a conductor the one she most resembles is Andre Previn. She can phrase a melody with the best, and she loves loud things. Her wheelhouse is around the early 1900's - Mahler, Strauss, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Britten and Prokofiev. Her 'production' ideas have always been genuinely good... so how bad this was is so shocking.
I'm, to say the least, not a Prokofiev person, but I make exceptions, and the biggest exception of all is, of course, for R&J, which is an absolute masterpiece. Prokofiev was a man of the stage, not the concert hall, and he even thought of symphonic form as theater. The Classical Symphony is obviously a masterpiece, but it is a stylistic experiment that's basically unrepeatable. It's one of his many stylistic effects, effects that can tell a story in dramatic forms like ballet and opera. But his best instrumental works are, I think, works where he can tell little dramatic stories - which are usually involve the dialogue between soloist and orchestra....
But then there's the problem of those slashing razor blade rhythms which people are polite enough to call motoric. And that ugly, harsh orchestral sound - to me, Prokofiev's music is much much uglier than Schoenberg, Prokofiev is so often just out to shock without any moral vision behind it, I just find his ugliness depressing while I often find Schoenberg's transcendent and profound.
So this is one of those rare recordings that 'integrates' Prokofiev's musical personality. Yes, Prokofiev could use more crisp attacks (not an Alsop's specialty) and Russian sound (which is often a Baltimore specialty), but by staying pretty close to Prokofiev's metronome marks, by not overemphasizing Prokofiev's dramatic effects, you (I) hear a level of irony in both the dark and light moments that is rare in this score which is so often used for a virtuoso grandstand that has nothing behind it. This is Prokofiev of the Classical Symphony, heir to Haydn and Mozart. Prokofiev is so obvious and palpable that if musicians did not 'believe in this music' enough to exaggerate the dramatic effects, I think Prokofiev would go up in my estimation and many other people's.
So then there's my beloved BSO, whom I missed doing the excerpts today under Rune Bergmann - whom I'd have loved to see our music director and I have a suspicion will be in roughly five years.... The BSO is obviously not the Vienna Philharmonic, but even under Marin Alsop, it remained a marvelous orchestra that on any night can deliver better things than any famed band on the East coast. Twenty-five years after Zinman, the attacks are not as crisp but there's more cantabile and bass heaviness (probably a function of Temirkanov), the solo instrumentalists are honestly better, and the instrumentalists are more confident. The orchestra phrase more as a group of soloists than as a unit - and I prefer that freedom. But they also listen to each other and respond. It's a magnificent orchestra that just needs a real master to shape them. I had hoped that master, we all did, would be Markus Stenz, whom if he cared at all about his career would have beaten out Kirill Petrenko for the Berlin Philharmonic, but let's pray Jonathon Heyward has what it takes and sticks around long enough to effect the change we need.
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