BRÜNNHILDE OFF BOOK Joanna Porackova didn’t just sing the part, she portrayed the character. |
Jonathan McPhee is a hard man to keep up with. Last month, he was leading Gustav Mahler’s titanic Eighth Symphony — the “Symphony of a Thousand” — with the combined Lexington and Nashua Symphony Orchestras, an outrageously ambitious project that was brought off with great credit. This month, as the music director at Boston Ballet, he’s conducting most of that company’s 40 performances of The Nutcracker. But McPhee also leads the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble made up mostly of area music professionals, and last Saturday, the LSO offered an ambitious program of its own: Alexander Borodin’s Hollywood-ready Second Symphony, and then, after intermission, two selections from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and, with soprano Joanna Porackova, Brünnhilde’s Immolation.You might have imagined that Jordan Hall would be full, if not packed: Borodin’s symphonies are hardly ever performed in Boston, and music from Götterdämmerung is also a rarity (though Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic gave us Siegfried’s Funeral March and the Immolation, with Linda Watson, in November 2009). It was not. Was everyone across the way at Symphony Hall for the final Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of 2010? Or all shopped out after the first Saturday of the holiday season? Or does the impression persist that because the Longwood players are medical professionals, they can’t be expected to play like professional musicians?
Well, consider Dr. Borodin. Yes, Alexander Borodin (1833–1887) was a chemist and a physician first and a composer second, and though he was only 53 when he died of a heart attack, he left us a major opera, Prince Igor, as well as music good enough, when cobbled together into the 1953 Broadway musical Kismet, to make him the proud, if posthumous, possessor of a Tony. His Second Symphony (1877) is an odd duck, starting off with a big stentorian theme (borrowed by Kismet for “Fate”) that’s cousin to the “Fate” motif that starts off Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (from the same year) but gets less than half as much room to develop — eight minutes — as Tchaikovsky’s does. The second theme, too, keeps threatening to sing out and never quite does. It all vaguely suggests some gathering in mediæval Russia — hardly surprising, since Borodin was working on the 12th-century-set Prince Igor at the same time. The second movement chatters and chirps like a fair on the steppes; the third is introduced by a nostalgic horn solo recalling the days of ancient Rus; the finale might have you imagining those ancient heroes riding home to their princesses — there are passages that seem destined for the soundtrack of a 1940s Hollywood version of Prince Igor starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.
All this McPhee and the LSO conveyed idiomatically and with rough-hewn intelligence, from the meaty statement of the “Fate” theme in the cellos and basses to the dreamy horn solo from principal Vanessa Gardner. Against balances that weren’t always ideally calibrated, there was the way McPhee (like Claudio Abbado in his recording of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky score) conjured Orthodox chant with his even stressing of beats.
Related:
Love and Robots in Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera, Tod Machover's Death and the Powers, plus Norrington's C.P.E. Bach and the Cantata Singers' B-minor Mass, Get thee to the Apohadion for a masterful show, More
- Love and Robots in Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera
A third of the way through the opera Death and the Powers: the Robots' Opera , the leading man becomes a machine.
- Tod Machover's Death and the Powers, plus Norrington's C.P.E. Bach and the Cantata Singers' B-minor Mass
In her director's note for the American premiere of Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera , Diane Paulus, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, wrote that this "work of music-theater . . . has brought together artists from the widest range of disciplines — from theater and film to modern dance and the cutting-edge technology of the MIT Media Lab."
- Get thee to the Apohadion for a masterful show
The lurching black satire of The Threepenny Opera is a study in grotesques: Monstrous caricatures of amorality and the blade of the bottom line are both repellent and ridiculously entertaining in this 1928 musical condemnation of capitalism.
- The Big Hurt: Faces refaced
Faces refaced, Spears speared, Hook hacked
- Trans Am | What Day Is It Tonight? Trans Am Live, 1993 - 2008
Trans Am are distillers of guilty pleasures, mixing fat AOR riffs with sleazy electronic accents and a propulsive attitude typically reserved for arcade soundtracks. What Day Is It Tonight? covers the DC-area band’s 20-year history with high-quality, high-energy live cuts taken from their many tours.
- Various Artists | Panama! 3
If you purchase a copy of Soundway’s wonderful Panama! 3 — and you should — you get two things for the price of one. First, this is a carefully curated CD of “Calypso Panameño, Guajira Jazz & Cumbia Típica on the Isthmus 1960-75” that will keep you smiling — and perhaps dancing — for a healthy while.
- The Big Hurt: Season's beatings
Taking advantage of your seasonal obligation to buy stuff for people, the music industry unleashes its annual torrent of giftable crap: holiday albums, greatest-hits packages, high-profile releases, deluxe reissues.
- Rihanna | Rated R
Look, it’s not as if there were a song where she says, “Chris Brown, you chicken-shit motherfucker, your ass is gonna pay.”
- The Rolling Stones | Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert
This live 1969 Madison Square Garden set was released at the band's peak, following Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed , preceding Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street , and recorded a week before the disaster at Altamont.
- The Big Hurt: Lambert works it, 50 blows it, Moz ends it
ADAM LAMBERT 's spicy AMA performance continues to dominate entertainment headlines, weeks after it first scandalized the nation — but why does America care what a man does with another man in the secluded privacy of the American Music Awards?
- Wanting more
After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.
- Less
Topics:
Classical
, Music, Benjamin Zander, Opera, More
, Music, Benjamin Zander, Opera, Jordan Hall, Jordan Hall, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Ballet, Richard Wagner, Jonathan McPhee, Jonathan McPhee, Less