Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall, January 22
It’s a shame, really. Dumbarton Oaks deserved better. Stravinsky was one of the composers who most strongly resisted Beethoven’s dominance; he spent most of his career seeking out and exploiting musical idioms that hadn’t been swallowed up by the Beethoven tradition, from baroque and ancient music to ragtime and jazz. Bach was the model for Dumbarton Oaks, a kind of mutant Brandenburg Concerto in which Bach’s lovely contrapuntal architecture is invaded by a mysterious Stravinskian darkness. It’s a little unnerving at first, because odd dissonances keep disrupting the serene surface, as though the musicians are getting flustered and making mistakes; only gradually do you notice that the jarring errors are being smoothly woven back into the intricately unfolding development. The cumulative result is lovely and strange: the baroque and modernist strains are effortlessly fused into something new, like an ancient tapestry of a cubist rose.
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I think the symphony is more charming and surprising done as a period piece–if only because you don’t normally think of Beethoven as an exemplar of Viennese elegance. And yet here he is sounding just like Mozart on an off day: swift, delicate, witty, and brainless. In a performance that reflects this world, the familiar Beethoven comes through only in incidental moments: in a few passages of grating stridency in the allegros, in the way the larghetto overextends itself, shifting from delicately dreamy to oppressively somnolent. Such odd, irreconcilable flashes of unpleasantness let you sense how impatient Beethoven was becoming, how he was beginning to shove irritably against the whole foundation of musical culture.
But enough of the fire came through in the end, when Perlman roused himself for a vigorous take on the rondo. And anyway it isn’t really wrong to play Beethoven for his flowing melodies–that’s as much a part of his world as his storm-crowned mountain ranges–and nobody has ever caught those melodies the way Perlman has.
