by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
For New Year’s Eve PBS had on a gala benefit concert by the
New York Philharmonic under its current music director, Alan Gilbert, that was
supposed to be a salute to “La Vie Parisienne.” Gilbert made a speech at the
beginning of the concert that this theme had been decided on before the horrific Islamic State attacks on Paris in
November, but those events had added “poignancy” to the program. The program
included only one brief work by one of the three people I consider France’s greatest
composers — Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel — Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,”
which for the occasion was played by both pianist and orchestra. Ravel wrote the piece in 1900 for piano solo
and orchestrated it in 1910, and in the 1930’s it was turned into a pop song
called “The Lamp Is Low.” Both Benny Goodman and Red Norvo recorded “The Lamp
Is Low,” and for Norvo’s version the young arranger Eddie Sauter drenched it in
Ravelian harmonies and orchestral colors, in a sense returning it to its source.
For last night’s performance the New York Philharmonic played Ravel’s
orchestral score but invited pianist Makoto Ozone to improvise along with them,
though most of his contributions were discreet obbligati to Ravel’s orchestral
score and only towards the end did the orchestra stop and allow Ozone to
improvise a cadenza, which he did quite tastefully and in the spirit of Ravel’s
original. Not surprisingly, the piece was the most beautiful music heard all
night! The program opened with the overture to Offenbach’s Orpheus in
the Underworld — a piece that, like
Rossini’s William Tell overture,
includes a strain just about everyone knows (in William Tell it’s the “Lone Ranger” theme and in Offenbach’s it’s
his famous can-can), but the strain just about everyone knows doesn’t occur
until the very end of the piece. Gilbert proved himself more at home in the
slower, more lyrical earlier sections than in the famous can-can, and here and
throughout the program there was a particularly good (as well as particularly handsome!)
Black man in the orchestra’s clarinet section taking all the solos for his
instrument. After the overture mezzo-soprano Susan Graham — whose voice was
considerably better than the material she was given to sing with it — did an
aria called “Ah, quel diné” from Offenbach’s operetta La Périchole (which is actually about the invasion of Peru by the
Spaniards in the 1500’s, and came in carrying a glass of champagne (or at least
some prop substitute thereof). She tried to make herself sound drunk because
apparently the character in the operetta singing the aria is supposed to be
drunk.
After that there was the
centerpiece of the program — a truly awful version of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival
of the Animals featuring Nathan Lane as
narrator. Saint-Saëns wrote Carnival
as an instrumental suite (and, interestingly, thought the results so poor he
never allowed the piece to be published during his lifetime) but in 1947
Columbia Records hired Ogden Nash to write a humorous narration in verse for a
record they were preparing (and which they probably issued on their yellow
label, indicating that these were records for children) in the manner of
Prokofieff’s Peter and the Wolf.
Unfortunately, last night’s performance featured a newly written narration by
Laurence O’Keefe and Neil Benjamin, in which Saint-Saëns’ “animals” were turned
into various human “types” lurking around New York City. This could have been good satire — indeed, in 1964 Allan
Sherman did something very similar with Peter and the Wolf when, hired to perform with the Boston “Pops,” he
rewrote it as Peter and the Commissar, a satire on dumb, insensitive bureaucracies in general and the Soviet
system in particular. Alas, the gulf between Sherman and the O’Keefe/Benjamin
team as satirists is about the size of the one between Chaplin and the latest
movie or TV “comic” who thinks he can get laughs by dropping his drawers. Lane
did the best, and he’s enough of a professional that he was able to get the
horrifically unfunny O’Keefe/Benjamin lines out of his mouth and act like he thought they were the most hilarious words
in the world, and Gilbert filled in with a quite moving and transparent
performance of the score’s strictly musical parts. But overall the piece was an
absolutely disgusting misfire and the New York Philharmonic and PBS should have
been ashamed of themselves for putting it on the air! I was amused, however, not only that the orchestra was
using reduced personnel and including the composer’s parts for two pianos
(Saint-Saëns originally wrote the piece for piano duo and, like Ravel, only
later orchestrated it), played by Israeli pianist Ivan Barnatan and Japanese
pianist Makoto Ozone. I was amused that Ozone and Barnatan were both playing,
not from printed scores, but from images of the score on a tablet computer
(though afterwards in the Ravel Ozone played from paper), and they were playing
two different brands of piano: one a Steinway, one a Yamaha.
Afterwards came
the Ravel piece — the first selection in the second set — and then a couple of
songs sung by Susan Graham, one called “C’est Ça la Vie, C’est Ça l’Amour” by
expatriate Cuban composer Moïses Simons (by being a Cuban and writing a song in
France — with French lyrics — he was essentially reversing the process begun
with Sebastian Yradier’s “Habañera,” a piece written in and about Cuba and
transposed to Spain for French composer Bizet’s opera Carmen). Ironically, the song turned out to be an ironic
and joking retelling of the story of Carmen, complete with a bullfighter and a few passes by the
mezzo. After that she did
the great Édith Piaf hit “La Vie en Rose” — two choruses, the first in French
and the second in English, which was nice — which was better than the Simons
piece (the Simons really needed a
singer like Josephine Baker or Eartha Kitt, with a stronger sense of how to
phrase pop music and a heavier vibrato in the voice to suggest world-weariness)
but still lacking the wrenching power of Piaf’s own version or the marvelous
musicianship of Louis Armstrong, who recorded what I think is the best version
of the English lyric: though his voice is weird to imagine in this role, his
sense of phrasing and overall musicianship are excellent and it’s no surprise
to me that he’s still the winner and champion for singing “La Vie en Rose” in
English. The program closed in a rather embarrassing way; Gilbert and the
orchestra were supposed to play a suite from Gaîté Parisienne, the ballet arranged from Offenbach’s music by
Moritz Rosenthal in the 20th century, but with a ruthless commitment
to keeping the program under 90 minutes they pulled the plug on the orchestra
right after they’d played the ballet’s overture, and so the second movement of
the suite just became backdrop for the closing credit roll and the rest wasn’t
heard at all: a tacky ending to a tacky show. At least the last time the New York Philharmonic decided to
commemorate French music on New Year’s Eve, they played substantial music like
Debussy’s La Mer and Ravel’s Bolero — and this year they could have had Susan Graham do
Berlioz’ song cycle Les Nuits d’Été
(which would have suited her voice magnificently) instead of operetta and pop
schlock!