While most PBS stations (including ours in previous years)
followed up the Capitol Fourth telecast
with a repeat showing of the same program, this year KPBS chose instead to
rerun a local show originally taped August 30, 2019 — and, let’s face it,
rebroadcasts of concerts during the SARS-CoV-2 crisis actually make more sense
than rerunning sporting events, since with a concert at least you know how it’s going to turn out and there’s no big
suspense about the outcome. The show actually began with the San Diego
Symphony’s current conductor, Rafael Payare, leading members of its brass section
in a piece that was instantly familiar: the old traditional Shaker hymn “The
Gift to Be Simple.” (Unfortunately for the Shakers, their idea of “simplicity”
included a total ban on their members having sex — and, not surprisingly, their
numbers dwindled over time.) The Symphony brass played this in an arrangement
by J. Villanueva, but most American classical-music fans identify this with
Aaron Copland because he used the song twice: as one of the 10 “Old American
Songs” he arranged for voice and piano and a principal theme of his ballet Appalachian
Spring. (The ballet is supposed to depict a
Shaker wedding ceremony, but if your sect doesn’t allow you to have sex, what
do you do on the wedding night?) The August 30, 2019 concert was devoted
entirely to the music of Tchaikovsky, both familiar and not so familiar. It was
conducted by Australian-born Christopher Dragon (I wondered if he was related
to 1940’s arranger-conductor Carmen Dragon and his considerably better-known
son, Daryl Dragon —who was “the Captain”in The Captain and Tenille, but he
isn’t), who’s now the principal conductor of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra
and came off during this concert as a screaming queen. (Well, that’s not
entirely inappropriate since Tchaikovsky was Gay.) The first piece they played
was the rather aggressive and sometimes ugly “Marche Slave” — Tchaikovsky was not a Russian nationalist, politically or musically, and
when he tried to pose as one the results were generally not good. His main
quarrel with the other leading Russian composers of his day, the so-called
“Mighty Five,” was they wanted to root their music in Russian folk songs,
traditions and legends and Tchaikovsky thought Russian musicians ought to look
to the West for their models.
The next work on the program was one I was
unfamiliar with, though I’d heard its main theme before: “Souvenir d’un lieu
cher,” Opus 42 (and his use of a French title was itself a spit-in-the-face to
the Russian musical nationalists!). According to the Arkivmusic.com Web site, “This
charming violin work owes its generation to the unique relationship between
Tchaikovsky and his wealthy patroness, Nadezha von Meck. Effectively freeing
the composer from any financial burden in life, this patronage carried with it
the unusual ‘rider’ that the two parties were never to meet.” (One of the
financial burdens Ms. von Meck freed Tchaikovsky from was all the hustlers who
were blackmailing him.) Tchaikovsky wrote this work, whose French title means
“Memory of a Dear Place” (the said place being von Meck’s villa in Brailovo,
Ukraine, where Tchaikovsky was allowed to stay when von Meck wasn’t living
there herself), around the time he was also working on his violin concerto, and
apparently its first movement, “Méditation,” was originally intended as the slow
movement of the violin concerto but was later replaced with the “Canzonetta”
that’s there now. Also, Tchaikovsky only completed a version for violin and
piano, and it was Alexander Glazunov who orchestrated it — but it’s still nice
to know that, even though the movement structure is slow-fast-slow instead of
the fast-slow-fast, we have what amounts to a second Tchaikovsky violin
concerto and I wish more soloists and orchestras would pair the two together on
CD instead of coupling the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with
violin-and-orchestra works by other composers. The violin soloist was a young
woman from the Utah Symphony named Ashlee Oliverson, and she was utterly
glorious, fitting the mostly soft, elegiac mood of the music but being able to
turn on the virtuosic juice when the score required it.
Then conductor Dragon
and the orchestra played the last movement from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 —
apparently as a promotion for the complete Symphonies Nos. 4 and 6 the
orchestra was supposed to play in their 2019-2020 season before SARS-CoV-2
pulled the plug on most concerts as well as big live events in general.
Dragon’s interpretation was energetic and quite enjoyable, but I still think
the best recording of this symphony is Leonard Bernstein’s 1970’s recording wth
the New York Philharmonic, which I just re-acquired in a boxed set of
Bernstein’s Tchaikovsky recordings with that orchestra (which includes all of
Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies — and if you want a great recording of
the Tchaikovsky symphonies at a reasonable price, look no further). The second
half of the concert featured eight numbers from the Swan Lake ballet — I’m not sure what the provenance of the
version Dragon programmed is but Tchaikovsky arranged a suite of six numbers
from the score just before he died and gave it a separate opus number, 20a (the
full ballet is 20). Neither Tchaikovsky’s own suite nor whatever it was Dragon
programmed seem to make any attempt to follow the order of numbers in the
complete ballet, much less tell a potted version of the ballet’s story, though
of course Dragon opened with the so-called “Scène” that begins Act II (when the
plot leaves the superficial high-life of the court of Prince Siegfried and
enters the supernatural world of the titular swan lake, the evil sorcerer
Rothbart who turns human women into swans, and Odette, his principal victim and
the ballet’s star; though the principal ballerina in Swan Lake is obliged to dance a dual role, the good swan-woman
Odette and the bad swan-woman Odile, who tries to seduce Siegfried from Odette)
which was used over the opening credits of the early-1930’s classic horror
films from Universal, Dracula and
The Mummy.
The concert’s finale,
of course, was the 1812 Overture
— actually heard complete, not just the flashy last four minutes we get at the Capitol
Fourth concerts. The 1812
Overture was composed by Tchaikovsky in
1880 for a celebration of the 70th anniversary of Russia’s defeat of
Napoleon’s invading armies in 1812 — so one of the pieces trotted out at Fourth
of July celebrations is about the successful defense by an autocracy against a
foreign invader who brought at least some elements of democracy and
enlightenment in its wake. (One historian commented that many of the countries
Napoleon occupied kept some of his reforms in place even after his fall —
whereas the countries the Nazis had occupied in World War II couldn’t wait to
get rid of every vestige of Nazi rule. I think the case he was making was that
Napoleon was a twisted idealist who actually did the countries he invaded some good, while Hitler was just a thug who plundered
them and killed the people he considered “racially inferior.”) Christopher
Dragon introduced the 1812 Overture
by quoting Tchaikovsky as saying the piece was “loud and noisy,” which it is
(though there is a hauntingly
lyrical theme in the middle of it), though I suspect what Tchaikovsky was
really saying was something like, “Yeah, it’s loud and noisy. I wrote it for a
big outdoor celebration where they expected loud and noisy, so I gave it to them — but I really
don’t like the piece and I’d just as soon never hear it played again.”
(Actually, Tchaikovsky conducted it himself at least twice after the premiere —
including at his famous concert opening Carnegie Hall in 1886 — so either he
liked it after all or he grudgingly yielded to the work’s popularity the way
Arthur Conan Doyle yielded to the popularity of Sherlock Holmes and brought him
back to life after killing him off in “The Final Problem.”)
The original
outdoor performance of the 1812 Overture featured not only a symphony orchestra but an onstage brass band, a
carillon and a battery of cannons — and after 1956, when Antál Doráti and the
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra recorded the 1812 Overture in a highly “produced” recording that added the U.S.
Field Artillery and the bells of the Harkness Carillon Tower for the climax,
the 1812 Overture has become a
“sonic spectacular” both on records and live. And if the cannon and bells
weren’t loud and noisy enough, Leopold Stokowski started the process of
bringing in a chorus to sing the words of the national anthem of Tsarist Russia
when Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score. Christopher Dragon’s performance was
relatively low-keyed in the extra-noise department — a few cannon and a
tubular-bells player — but it did
accompany a fireworks display (so my husband Charles got to see televised
fireworks after all after having got home from work too late to see the ones on
A Capitol Fourth) and made a nice
conclusion to a SARS-CoV-2-conditioned low-keyed Fourth of July!
