Last Night's Concert

 I went to a fascinating but dispiriting concert last night.

It started with a nearly masterly performance of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony from an unlikely source. I often think that James Conlon would be happier with a career like Jaimie Laredo's, in front of chamber orchestras where he can do utterly unfashionable performances of Haydn and Mozart. What we heard last night was the most gemutlich, large orchestra, vibrato laden, old-Vienna performance of Schubert's Unfinished one will ever hear. You'd think it was Josef Krips up there. He must have spent hours getting that high cholesterol string sonority from Baltimore musicians still trained in David Zinman's period punchiness. It was just short of heavenly, with extremely un-Conlon like rubato and ostentatious detailing in the phrasing. He seems to have spent his entire career scaling down Wagner, Verdi and Shostakovich to sound more like Schubert and Mozart, while in Schubert and Mozart he does all the operatic things you'd expect from Verdi and Wagner. After three years of watching this guy, I just don't understand him: a vastly skilled musician who's performed all around the world for fifty years, but whose conception of music has never moved on from the mistaken values of 1970s Juilliard.

I should have left after that, because then came 50 minutes of 'automatic' Wagner, played like a machine that you simply turn on and off. Hardly any phrasing, hardly any detail, barely a memorable moment: generic, generic, generic.

But it is utterly unbelievable how Wagner's orchestration still fits the modern orchestra like a glove, every detail speaks in the concert hall with utter clarity. It's the exact opposite of the older masters. In Mozart, Schubert, Brahms you have to work endlessly hard to get the music's details to speak properly. Many claim it's different for them with a period instrument ensemble, but I'm far from convinced. In those three particularly, it's almost as if the expression in is so high minded that they're barely even conscious of what instruments they use, and the work is on the composers. It's as Joachim said of Brahms that they don't write for musicians, they write against musicians.

But contra his reputation, Wagner fits the capabilities of instrument so easily, even proper Wagner voices are supposed to find it easy to sing with the way he divides vocal parts through the entire vocal range - whereas Verdi stays planted all night long in the voice's top 20 percent,

There's a reason Wagner makes every detail register: he is the music of sociopathy, manipulating emotions in the audience so effortlessly that he does feel himself. In Schubert, such emotions are a confession by the not composer, human communication from one heart to another. But emotions that exist in Schubert like a partnership of equals becomes emotional manipulation in Wagner - designed to excite audiences to fever pitch. Perhaps Wagner skeptics like me would find our responses more easily exploited if today's singers were better. The Brunnhilde last night was Christine Goerke, possessing a power tool of a mid range with a vibrato through which you can sometimes fit a mac truck. Aside from Lisa Davidsen, this is the best we'll do today, and how can Wagner make its proper effect without voices to equal his charisma?

You can't blame the singers: the expectations of singers are so high today. Not even Wagner can account for today's huge halls, loud orchestral instruments, slow tempos, and relative lack of emphasis on vocal technique. No modern singer can get through Wagner without blowing out their voice in a couple years.

As I've said many times, as everybody's said many times, one can't deny Wagner's genius. He is, as Auden argued, possibly the greatest artistic genius of all time. Wagner's is an endlessly meaningful art, for which there is no bottom in the numbers of ways it can be analyzed, interpreted, and felt, but there are problems in Wagner that stick out like a sociopath amid normal people, and next to Schubert, he can sound paltry indeed. One excites and disturbs the soul, one nourishes it.