Sir Andrew Davis Conducts the New York Philharmonic
Susan Graham and Kent Tritle Solo Artists
By: Susan Hall - Jun 07, 2010
Sir Andrew Davis, Conductor
Susan Graham, Mezzo-Soprano
Kent Tritle, Organ
Berlioz, Overture to Les Francs-Juges
Chausson, Poeme de l’amour et de la mer
Saint-Saens Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 78
The New York Philharmonic
June 5, 2010
The New York Philharmonic presented an intoxicating evening of French music conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. He was particularly suited to the program, having studied the organ at King’s College, Cambridge and served as principal conductor at Glyndebourne and now at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. During the Lyric’s 2009-10 season he conducted this program’s soloist Susan Graham in Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust.
Davis is a tight conductor, whose body beats the rhythm, and whose hands do all the work. No stick here. An effective quick grasp signals the end of a phrase or section. It works perfectly.
The French repertoire is one of Davis’s many specialties. How does French music differ from all other music? Music historian Donald Jay Grout once wrote: “The specifically French tradition...rests on music as sonorous form, in contrast to...music as expression. Order and restraint are fundamental. Emotion…is conveyed only as it has been entirely transmuted into music….the music tends to be lyric or dancelike rather than epic or dramatic, economical rather than profuse, simple rather than complex, reserved rather and grandiloquent; above all, it is not concerned with delivering a message about the fate of the cosmos or the state of the composer’s soul.”
Berlioz opened the program with a bang. Baring his soul when his father forced him to go to medical school, he railed: “Become a doctor! Study anatomy! Dissect! Take part in horrible operations – instead of giving myself body and soul to music, sublime art whose grandeur I was beginning to perceive! Forsake the highest heaven for the wretchedest regions of earth, the immortal spirits of poetry and love and their divinely inspired strains for dirty hospital orderlies, dreadful dissecting-room attendants, hideous corpses, the screams of patients, the groans and rattling breath of the dying! No, no! It seemed to me the reversal of the whole natural order of my existence. It was monstrous. It could not happen. Yet it did...” Hardly the cool composer of French tradition.
Extracting himself from medical school and foregoing the family fortune, Berlioz took up composition full time. Opera was the form de jour, much like film and video today, and Berlioz immediately started composing them. His best friend Humbert Fernand provided the text for Les Francs-Juges. Berlioz was never able to arrange a production, and only six fragments remain.
At age 38. Berlioz’s only publicly performed music in Paris was a set of recitatives composed for Weber’s Der Freischutz so that opera would comply with the ban on spoken dialogue.
The Francs-Juges overture was first performed at the Paris Conservatoire in 1828, and Berlioz would conduct it many more times during his lifetime. Other parts of Les Francs-Juges were re-cycled in other works. The marches des gardes appears in Symphony Fantastique as the marche au supplice.
In the overture, Berlioz explores the colors of orchestral instruments and the feelings they can evoke. Feelings, that un-French style. He added depth to both the upper and lower registers of the orchestra with two piccolos, contrabassoon and two tubas—which replace the original ophicleides, brass-keyed bugles no longer used. Such textures perfectly portray the chilling menace of the courts. They were evocatively performed by the orchestra. The indomitable brass section gave its all to the fanfares.
Chanteuse Susan Graham swept onto the stage in a full-length sea blue gown, covered like a mermaid’s with silk scales. Dangling from her ears were sparkles, sea spray sunning. She wore smoothed stones of blue, green and yellow around her neck.
One of the world’s leading mezzos, she often sings Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedictin, Les Tryoens, and the Damnation of Faust. Un Frisson Francais, a century of French song, which she champions, is one of her recent recordings. It includes Chausson.
Chausson in some ways was a blessed composer. He had enough money not to worry about it. However, his anxiety got channeled full force into worries about his competence as a musician.
Graham’s rendition of the Poeme, aided by Davis and the orchestra, was meticulous, full of dynamic expanse and wide-ranging lines and phrases always shaped to maximize expression. Graham conveys emotion by classic vocal technique, lightening her tone, sometimes reducing sound to a quiver. She has a warm, large voice, a size heard more often today in concert than in the opera house.
Une chanteuse for all seasons, Graham sings repertoire from Gluck to Jake Heggie and Tobias Picker. Her detailed diction is the scaffolding of gorgeous lines and lush tones. At the dramatic conclusion of Poeme, the conductor graced her with the French bise to both cheeks. The audience stood, now a regular and deserved response at Avery Fisher. They might have been preparing to go to Susan Graham Day in Midland, Texas, her hometown.
Berlioz said of Saint Saens, whose Third Symphony was performed last on the program, ‘he knows everything but lacks inexperience.’ On leaving the Conservatoire Saint Saens took up various posts as organist, culminating in the Madeleine. He became famous for his organ improvisations, some of which found their way into his published compositions, for example the finale of this Third Symphony.
Saint Saens defended improvisation as long as the music was in the spirit of the occasion on which it was performed. Kent Tritle, the evening’s soloist, must have understood Saint Saens: “ I improvised constantly, giving my imagination the widest range. That was one of the joys of life.”
Avery Fisher does not have a pipe organ and Tritle made do with an electronic one. Saint Saens wrote that the organ was not only an orchestra in and of itself, but even greater than an orchestra. The Philharmonic may have decided not to install the competition.
The Symphony No. 3 is a two-part structure which uses a technique first developed by Liszt. Saint Saens admired Liszt. When he told him he would dedicate this symphony to him, Liszt demurred. Saint Saens always felt that Liszt as composer had been undervalued because he was such a flashy pianist. This Symphony bore a posthumous dedication to him.
The Symphony’s two motto themes, often heard on the old radio soap operas, are transformed through clever transformations and modifications. They inform the entire work. Although the organ is billed as solo instrument, it isn’t displayed in its full glory until the second movement and then all stops are pulled out by Saint-Saens. Organist Tritle was appropriately wild.
Poet John Milton wrote on the importance of the organ in the great order of things:
Ring out, ye crystal spheres!
Once bless our human ears,
If ye have power to touch our senses so;
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;
An let the bass of heaven’s deep organ blow;
And with your nine fold harmony
Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.
Saint Saens returned to the classic definition of French music, “Music is something besides a source of sensuous pleasure and keen emotion, and this resource, precious as it is, is only a chance corner in the wide realm of musical art. He who does not get absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music.”
Whatever else can be said of French music, it enchants the ear, and the New York Philharmonic, Susan Graham and barehanded conductor Andrew Davis brought us some enchanted evening.