Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
It was an awkward situation. Nothing gives you a purer rush of trapped-behind-enemy-lines paranoia than realizing you’re the only one in the room who isn’t wildly enthusiastic about what’s happening onstage. I was reminded of when I saw Star Wars on its opening weekend 20 years ago; everybody in the movie theater was cheering so furiously they were like the possessed mob in Euripides’ Bacchae, and I was afraid that if I didn’t join in they’d turn on me. But I’ve since attained a higher degree of moral integrity–or perhaps I’ve lost some of my instinct for self-preservation. Chailly’s concert left me bored and exasperated, and I don’t care who knows it.
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To begin with, the RCO was having a bad night. The Mahler in particular was marred by fluffed notes and miscues. Well, big deal–maybe their plane got in late and they were a little frazzled. (In fact, they were rehearsing until the last possible minute, while the audience was kept milling around the lobby.) But given their huge reputation, I was expecting an immaculate performance. I was also bugged by the way their style of playing, even at its best, went against the grain of Orchestra Hall. Of course the whole problem of the hall’s acoustics is a soap opera with no end in view. More work was done over Christmas, and the place sounds distinctly better than it did last fall. But it will probably always be a relatively dry sonic environment, where an orchestra like the RCO will never sound right. Their style is all rich bass and subtly shaded tone colors–and clearly dependent on those magical European halls where the reverb slowly melts away into a honeyed silence. Here the soloists sounded raspy, painfully loud, and sometimes out of tune, and the orchestral accompaniment was consistently thin.
The violin concerto has a lot of strange echoes of the past. The violin solos have a sliding, off-kilter edginess that isn’t totally removed from the meandering poetry of the solos in Beethoven or Mendelssohn. The orchestrations are often jarring in the best modern way, but they also have a creepy Wagnerian allure. The two movements seem at times to be groping toward a typical concerto structure–though ultimately they proceed more by association and drift. The focus glides weirdly from one array of shifting tones to the next, ignoring expected lines of development and unfolding into more elusive and more troubling vistas of psychic turmoil. In a sense, it’s a brilliant psychological portrait of grief: it catches perfectly how muffled one’s moods become, how easy it is to wander down dark trails of thought. This may be why its atonality works even for the most conservative listeners–the dissonances so plainly mean something. Berg is exploring something extremely grim but recognizable, not taunting the audience for its bourgeois conventionality.
But Chailly seemed to think this jumble of affects was nothing more than a genial panorama of everyday life. He did everything possible to defuse the tension and flatten out the freaky contrasts, beginning with an excessively slow and solemn funeral march. The whole point of the march–the reason it’s so disturbing and affecting–is that it isn’t solemn. It’s jaunty, it even swaggers. It’s a fair sample of Mahler’s black but weirdly invigorating humor. Chailly played it as though it were a respectful farewell to some prosperous citizen. He also smoothed out the folk melodies and hunting songs, to the point where they came out like a travelogue about picnickers in an Austrian forest. But Mahler deliberately made these tunes garish and jangling, because they represent the way the outside world impinged on his consciousness–they’re a kind of psychic assault, street sounds shattering the nerves of an invalid. Chailly also stretched out the adagio unconscionably, without finding any particular compensations. It wasn’t spiritually consoling or ominously seductive–it was just pretty. Yet it should play something like Rilke’s famous line, “Beauty is the beginning of terror.” For Chailly, beauty was the beginning of complacency.
