Vagueness Limits MSO Concert

May 29, 2012

midnight

After the warm acoustics of Carnegie Hall, the sound of Uihlein Hall was duller than ever in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (MSO) concert of Friday evening. My ears were working hard to find a small percentage of the depth heard in New York in the strings. Even though William Walton's Crown Imperial had never been performed by MSO, it is familiar music, I think because it must have been used in film or on PBS. This march is almost a concert band work with added strings. The orchestra sounded crisp and tight, which made me hopeful at what was to come. After that opening I was especially disappointed with the vagueness in ensemble that came in Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy and Ralph Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 5. The wind players tried but failed time and again to cleanly attack an entrance as a unit, unable to find necessary guidance in guest conductor Christopher Warren-Green's apparently blurry beat pattern. As violin soloist, Jennifer Frautschi played with a light and generally lovely sound. Maybe too lovely. For my tastes this romantic music needed more color and extroverted phrasing. The highest notes were not always securely tuned. I find this Scottish Fantasy uninteresting, I'm afraid, and don't particularly understand why violinists have taken to it in recent years. Danis Kelly, certainly one of the MSO's best musicians, made much of the heavily featured harp part. I'll admit that I'm not a big fan of the music of Vaughan Williams. I find it bathed in sameness in its creamy English charm, with a limited palate of modal harmonies, instrumentation, rhythms and predictable use of canon. I think there is a reason that most of this composer's music has fallen out of the regularly performed repertoire, although he has his admirers. As mentioned earlier, the performance was not the sharpest, but it was certainly good enough to let the music be heard. An old beef: I wish those in the audience would have the courageyes, courageto remain seated during applause, and not feel it is always necessary to give a compulsory standing ovation, made meaningless by its predictability.

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In his 5/31/12 Shepherd MSO review Rick Walters ad...

In his 5/31/12 Shepherd MSO review Rick Walters admits “I’m not a big fan of the music of Vaughan Williams. I find it bathed in sameness in its creamy English charm.” That comment actually reveals Walters’ ignorance of the variety of this composer’s music—as if he’s only heard his pastoral music, such as The Lark Ascending, It also indicates he’s not a nature lover who’d love that exquisite evocation of the British countryside. The music Vaughan Williams wrote in a pastoral vein is not mere “creamy English charm.” What’s more, he also wrote turbulent music like his Fourth and Sixth symphonies that can hardly be accused of “creamy English charm”—dissonant music that musicologist Michael Kennedy said “proves that dissonance and stark orchestration, handled by a poet, can lead to a thing of beauty.”

Rick Walters is apparently one of those arrogant critics who feel it among their missions to put down composers they don’t like but many people love. Another was the Milwaukee Journal’s onetime classical music critic Walter Monfried, who didn’t like Sibelius and put down Samuel Barber’s First Symphony for its “Sibelian lugubriousness,” impervious to the concise power and dark beauty of one of the most rigorously worked out symphonies ever written—though, like the Vaughan Williams 5th, sadly seldom performed. Seeing as Rick Walters knew in advance that he had no feeling for the music of Vaughan Williams—and inadvertently revealed he had no real knowledge of its amazing variety—why didn’t he let some other person review this particular MSO concert? He preferred to display one of the blindspots in the spectrum of his music appreciation. My preview of this same concert, published in the previous week’s Shepherd, is far more knowledgeable and appreciative of the power and beauty of Vaughan Williams’ Fifth—in itself and in its historical context (it’s eye-of-calm at the center of the hurricanes unleashed in the Fourth and Sixth)—and of Vaughan Williams’ music in general.

For a much better, not biased-in-advance review see Tom Strini’s blog on the Third Coast Digest website:
“[British guest conductor Christopher] Warren-Green, also gets Vaughan Williams’ mesmerizing Symphony No. 5. The music inspires you not to stand up and cheer at the end, but to sit quietly in order to remain in its meditative aura as long as possible. Warren-Green’s calm grace of gesture put the musicians and us in the right frame of mind to sense the ineffable, not only in the mists of Vaughan Williams’ celestial harmonies in the slow music, but also in the skittering flights of angels in the scherzo. We all did, indeed, sit quietly for a long time at the end. It’s good to feel your place in the universe now and then. We do, after all, belong here.

Walters also complained that the audience gave the Vaughan Williams Fifth a standing ovation. As Tom Strini reports, the audience first sat in hushed silence—as it did during other quiet passages. Even the coughing that often afflicts performances of other concerts did not afflict this transcendently serene symphony—a sign of how deeply the audience (except for Walters and a relatively few others) was affected. Nearly a half minute passed before it stood and applauded. This symphony doesn’t have the sort of ending after which whistles or bravos are appropriate. But the audience clearly loved it and signified that by standing to applaud. Walters seems to think the audience should stand to applaud only for music he deems worthy.

Anonymous more than 14 years ago