Chicago Symphony Orchestra
But if the program sounded respectable, the concert proved freaky and tense. Segerstam likes taking chances, and his results were all over the map. Some things were brilliantly imaginative, some were hysterically overblown. And one performance was so bad it almost started a fight in the lower balcony. I’ve seen some odd concerts at Orchestra Hall over the years, but I can’t remember any that have been quite so nerve-racking.
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Anyway, he did manage to articulate the crucial point. February is an experiment, a work for full orchestra designed to be performed without a conductor. I’ve seen this done before with smaller forces, and in my experience you can get up to around a dozen players before the music starts to disintegrate. Segerstam was trying it with 87. It came off surprisingly well. He’d conceived the piece in such a way that it didn’t require synchronized playing; it was made up of huge, ragged swaths of gorgeous orchestral color, of endlessly building crescendos of strings and horns overlaid with bells and pennywhistles and musical saws and assorted percussive snaps, crackles, and pops. Segerstam himself joined in at the piano (grandly, but from where I was sitting, mostly inaudibly)–which he’d deliberately positioned in the back row of musicians, out of the orchestra’s line of sight, so as to forestall any surreptitious conducting by way of eye contact. Instead the players had to find their cues in the landmarks he’d scattered through the score: a harp trill, a particularly bold crash from the piano, a weird clack of wooden blocks. All in all, it was pretty fun to watch, though I thought it went on way too long–15 minutes or so when 5 or 6 would have been fine.
After the intermission Segerstam launched into Nielsen’s Sixth Symphony, and the results were unexpectedly and glitteringly right. Everything that was so ugly about the way he did Grieg–the meandering tempi, the fake melodrama, the surges of kitsch–turned out to be perfect for Nielsen. The Sixth Symphony is a peculiar work anyway, no matter who conducts it: Nielsen called it Sinfonia Semplice, that is, “simple symphony,” but that was just his little joke. It’s a jagged collage of discordant fragments–lurid, silly, eerie, wild, and exquisite–and to this day, nobody has satisfactorily answered whether he concocted this extravaganza as a satire on modernist music or as a genuine attempt to catch up with the avant-garde. Maybe that very undecidability worked for Segerstam, because he succeeded in conducting it as simultaneously a serious work and a joke.
I also found Segerstam’s own composition rather heartening–not that it was so great in itself, but that, like his conducting, it was so grandly sloppy and theatrical. This is something we haven’t had enough of–modernist composers doing big crowd-pleasing pieces. In fact, one of the most tiresome aspects of modernism has been the number of composers who’ve been so hostile to the dramatic, the exuberant, the impressive. Most modernist music sounds like it was constructed with calipers on graph paper. And in part because it sounds like it was never intended to be performed in a concert hall, a lot of conductors are reluctant to program it; they stick instead to 19th-century music, no matter how exhausted it might be, because at least it was designed to provoke a positive response from a living audience. But Segerstam comes on the scene displaying a refreshing indifference to this stalemate. He obviously grew up on the modernist idiom and takes its thorniest and most alienating gimmickry for granted. At the same time, unlike many modern composers, he has experience on the podium and an old-style love for spectacle and orchestral power. He composes and conducts modernist music for its untapped potential as drama, not as a demonstration of some academic theory.
