by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the annual New York Philharmonic New Year’s Eve
concert as telecast on PBS, and it turned out to be a great evening, considerably better than two of the more
recent predecessors (a mediocre 2012 tribute to songwriter Marvin Hamlisch, who
died just before it took place but was alive when the concert was planned —
which led me to the rather sour opinion that if they were going to do a tribute
to a living songwriter, it should have been Stephen Sondheim instead; and the
truly awful one from last year, a so-called salute to Paris featuring a rewrite
of Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals” with a new narration by Laurence
O’Keefe and Neil Benjamin that turned the original animals into various New
York “arty” types and was so excruciatingly unfunny it was a tribute to the
professionalism of narrator Nathan Lane that he got through the whole thing
without puking on air). Oddly, the show was called “Some Enchanted Evenings”
but neither that song nor anything else from South Pacific was performed; instead the Richard Rodgers and Oscar
Hammerstein II shows that were
represented were Carousel and
their last, The Sound of Music.
The show began with the “Four Dance Episodes” from Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo, a beautiful classical piece drawing on American
folk songs but extending them into a lovely and moving musical structure (I
remember that the day after I went to the press preview of Brokeback
Mountain and was disappointed, among other
things, by the desultory strings-and-percussion noodlings by composer Gustavo
Santoallala instead of the broad, sweeping score the film deserved; when I
played through a two-CD set of Copland’s own recordings of his big ballets, it
occurred to me, “This is the sort
of music Brokeback Mountain
should have had”) with a beginning, middle and end. This was far more “serious”
music than anything performed at last year’s concert except Ravel’s brief
“Pavane for a Dead Princess” (and even that had been “improved” by bringing on
a piano soloist to improvise, though at least it was done tastefully).
Afterwards mezzo-soprano Joyce di Donato was brought on to sing two of
Copland’s “Old American Folksong” settings, “The Gift to Be Simple” (the
awesomely beautiful Shaker hymn he also used as the main theme of the ballet Appalachian
Spring) and “I Bought Me a Cat” (which
sounds silly — especially with the High Seriousness with which all too many
opera singers approach a line like “My cat says fiddle-eye-fee” — but endearingly
so). Then the male vocal soloist, a baritone named Paolo Schott, came on and
did the “Soliloquy” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel — he did acceptably but no one who’s done this since has come close to John Raitt’s
riveting original on the Broadway cast album from 1945 (to his credit, Schott
used the original line about Billy Bigelow, Jr.’s putative wife, “a
skinny-lipped virgin with blood like water,” instead of “a skinny little lady,” the Production Code-bowdlerized version sung by
Gordon MacRae in the 1956 film version).
Afterwards outgoing New York
Philharmonic conductor Alan Gilbert (so far the only holder of that position
actually born in New York — Leonard Bernstein was American but from Boston)
played the one piece of the evening not by a U.S. composer, Johann Strauss, Jr.’s “On the Beautiful Blue
Danube” (hardly at the level of Stokowski or Karajan but still good in its own
right), which he said was a lead-in to songs from the Austrian-set The
Sound of Music. His choices from The
Sound of Music were unusual — not the big
pieces everybody knows like the title song or “My Favorite Things,” but “I Have
Confidence in Me” (which wasn’t in the original stage show; it was added for
the famous 1965 film starring Julie Andrews, and since Hammerstein was dead by
then Rodgers wrote words as well as music, though the line “I have confidence
in confidence alone” shows he’d learned something from all the years he’d worked with Hammerstein, and
with Lorenz Hart before him!) and the more familiar but still lesser “Climb
Ev’ry Mountain” (written for the Mother Superior of Maria von Trapp’s former
convent to sing at the end, and whose best version was done by Eileen Farrell
on the late-1980’s Telarc CD of the score featuring Federica von Stade as
Maria). Then the show moved into four pieces from Frederick Loewe’s My
Fair Lady, with lyrics and book by Alan Jay
Lerner (for some reason in Rodgers and Hammerstein the composer gets top
billing, while in Lerner and Loewe — as in Gilbert and Sullivan — the writer
does!). Loewe wasn’t American-born — he was born in Berlin in 1901, came to the
U.S. in 1925, and lived to 1988 but worked only rarely (Lerner has talked about
how difficult it was to get Loewe to do anything and a lot of projects he
wanted him for, including On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, he had to shop to other composers — in that case,
Burton Lane) — but in this story, based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which elocution teacher Professor Henry Higgins
insists he can pass off Cockney street flower-seller Eliza Doolittle as an
heiress just by teaching her upper-class English, Loewe and Lerner created the
most popular musical to that time (a record it held until Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Cats).
Alas, it wasn’t done
justice to in the New York Philharmonic’s excerpts because of the stunning
difference in quality between the two vocal soloists. Joyce di Donato is not
only a technically excellent singer, she enunciates well and projects the music
and texts with real emotional power. Schott is a good-voiced but sloppy singer
who seems to think that the art of singing begins and ends with hitting the
notes the score calls for and sustaining them for the required length. That’s
where the art of singing begins,
but it doesn’t end there! The four My Fair Lady excerpts were the instrumental “Embassy Waltz” (one
of the interludes customarily placed during a voice-and-orchestra concert to
give the singer[s] a chance to rest their voices), “I Could Have Danced All
Night” (vividly sung by Joyce di Donato even if she didn’t quite come out from
under the long shadow of Julie Andrews — again — who sang in the original
Broadway production of My Fair Lady
and made two albums with the original cast), “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her
Face” (sung by Schott with outrageous sloppiness — he even sang, “Like
breathin’ out and breathin’ in,” and apparently no one bothered to tell him he
was supposed to be playing an elocutionist!), and “The Rain in Spain” (which
was presented out of score order, obviously to give the two soloists a shot at
a duet). They continued duetting on “Anything You Can Do” from Irving Berlin’s Annie
Get Your Gun (an O.K. choice but there are
better songs from that score than that — I couldn’t help but wish they had let
di Donato loose on the score’s beautiful ballad, “They Say It’s Wonderful”) and
the opening “Carousel Waltz” from
the Carousel score (a marvelous
piece, though like just about every other conductor — including Richard Rodgers
himself — Gilbert didn’t capture the manic energy of Alfred Newman’s performance
for the 1956 Carousel film). Then
Alan Gilbert announced the final piece of the evening, “Auld Lang Syne,” and
asked the audience to sing along — only the show had reached the end of its
87-minute time slot and “Auld Lang Syne” was abruptly cut off for the closing
credits just as it was getting underway. Despite the abrupt ending and Schott’s
sloppy diction, however, this was an estimable concert, glorious in the opening
Copland Rodeo and quite good
singing from di Donato — a better male singer would have helped, but even so
this was a nice tribute to American music, both “classical” and Broadway, at
its best.
