calimac

The name of violinist Itzhak Perlman guarantees a sold-out concert, at least around here. I've heard him a couple times before, and while I enjoyed his playing, I was never staggeringly impressed. In fact I remember one recital where he seemed to be phoning in his performance.

Like other soloists who liked the challenge of leading the orchestra as well as playing during a Bach concerto, Perlman has turned conductor, and that's what he did this evening, playing and leading Bach's A Minor Violin Concerto, and conducting two symphonies. The results were very different.

Perlman's tone in the concerto was fine, not too thin; and I liked the overall shape of the work. It seemed small-scale, but solid. I especially liked the richness of the almost ostinato bass line in the Andante.

There was one amusing moment before the concerto. Perlman is a polio victim who walks with crutches, so the concertmaster, who comes out first, carries Perlman's violin along with his own. Then Perlman walks out. Applause. He seats himself, which takes a minute. The concertmaster hands him a violin. Perlman flips it over and looks at the back, as if checking the serial number to make sure he has the right one. The audience laughs. Perlman beckons over the concertmaster and tells him something at some length, probably assuring him that that's not what he meant.

Mozart's A Major Symphony (no. 29) is one of my favorites of his works: the first movement's principal theme is one of the small repertoire of tunes I like to batter out on the piano. It's one of the principal relics of Mozart's flirtation with the tense, dissonant Sturm und Drang style that ran through Austrian music in the early 1770s, and the tenser and more dissonant it sounds the more I like it. Perlman doesn't seem to share this view. He conducted this work as if it were the Haffner Serenade. Leached all the tension, and the interest, out of it. Mozart is very hard to do well, and if done poorly he sounds boring. Well, there we were.

After that, I wasn't expecting much from this performance of Dvorak's Symphony from the New World, but boy was I in for a surprise. Where did Perlman get the vision to give such a splendid view of this work? It well deserved the standing ovation it got (despite the strange cries of "sit down, we can't see" from somewhere behind me). This symphony is an extremely four-square, regular-phrased, call-and-response, block-constructed work, very unlike the free-flowing, rhapsodic, irregularly-phrased, cumulative-constructed music Dvorak wrote back at home in Bohemia, and I can't understand the conventional wisdom that it's just as Czech-sounding as the rest of his work. Dvorak was trying for something very different, and he achieved it. But it sounds best if played in a smooth, rhapsodic style, but with clarity of construction, and this is what we had here. I don't think I've ever heard a bad performance of this work, and this was one of the best: as a Dvorak performance, it's matched only by a superlative version of the G Major Symphony (no. 8) that Herbert Blomstedt conducted the SFS in some years ago, and which I was the only person to give a standing ovation to. This time the verdict was overwhelming.

I traded in my series ticket to last week's ecstatically-reviewed Mahler Ninth to go to this concert, and I think I got the better deal. After last season's Mahler Second I've decided that I don't care how well MTT conducts it, I never want to hear any Mahler live again except maybe the First. I'm officially declaring myself a maniac on this subject. I'd rather be listening to Dvorak.