Bottom Fifth
The NSO’s balance problems continue under Noseda, derailing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the Kennedy Center.
Do you remember when you and your friends were driving along in the car and your absolute favorite song came on the radio and you squealed with delight, and everyone started singing along and enjoying it to the hilt even though it was from a distant station and came in only partly through the static? Well, that was the scene last night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The National Symphony Orchestra under music director Gianandrea Noseda commenced its “Beethoven & American Masters” mini-series with the German icon’s First and Fifth symphonies, bookending George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 1 (1984).
I have complained time and again about balance problems with the NSO, across several music directors. So while Noseda is not an outlier, he is the current offender and last night was something of a nadir, in my experience. The Concert Hall acoustics seem almost designed to hide upper string sounds and embrace sustained wind and brass lines. I would conservatively estimate that 48% of the notes played by the NSO violins were inaudible; and the only person who can fix this is the conductor.
When the Cleveland Orchestra played the Mahler Ninth or the Concertgebouw played Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben for us here (works with far heavier brass complements than the Beethoven), the musicians and conductors worked together to make all the lines clear, no matter how loud the overall level. In rehearsal videos, one can watch the old orchestral wizard Leopold Stokowski firmly admonishing his brass players to always drop their sound immediately after the attack of the note, to allow the strings through. The point is, the undifferentiated wall of sound we were presented with last night is not pre-ordained; much more music is there if anyone cares to reveal it.
Yes, there was whooping applause last night, but the finale of the Beethoven Fifth is so visceral that those who know it mentally fill in the lost notes and those few who don’t cannot help but react to the blazing, climactic force of the brass. The only loser was Beethoven and those of us who love the symphony as he conceived it.
This was a problem in the First Symphony as well. Noseda cut the NSO string complement almost in half -- to highlight the work’s continuation of Haydn and Mozart – but Beethoven’s wind writing was lighter, so the proportions were similar to the Fifth. One “advantage” of the sonic wall was that imprecisions among the players (imprecisions borne of Noseda’s manic tempos) were also less audible.
But this was such a disappointing performance of the Fifth; the two-or-so minutes that connect the last part of the third movement to the beginning of the finale constitute the single greatest display of imagination in the entire symphonic literature, exploding every convention and changing the genre forever. With everything too fast and too loud, the genius was reduced to commonplace.
Walker (1922-2018), a D.C. native and Curtis-trained, was the first Black composer to win a Pulitzer Prize in music. After displaying marvelous expressive gifts in his early work, Walker, like Copland, Stravinsky, and Carter late in their careers, then turned to the dark side and began composing in a forbidding, off-putting atonal language, perhaps seeking greater “sophistication.” A pity. Roger Sessions, Bruno Maderna, Jacob Druckman, Oliver Knussen and others of this ilk also garnered attention from music critics in thrall to this boutique, but they and Walker will not leave much of a mark in music history. It is not more difficult to write music that ignores tonality or emotional content, it’s less. Just carefully crafted noise; by what criteria can someone judge the quality of one such composer’s work against the others? The Sinfonia No. 1, employed a huge orchestra, but with little to show for it. It was in two movements, but other than a faster tempo in the second, there was no textual, emotional, or atmospheric difference between them. Gnarly gestures, “sudden” outbursts, busy note-spinning, and a plethora of percussion left little impression, as the tepid applause made clear.
The NSO will perform all five of Walker’s Sinfonias in the coming year. I applaud the motivation, but cannot profess to be looking forward to it. Programming-wise, he would have more of a chance for appreciation if mixed in with other American composers of similar merit, rather than being put up against the greatest symphonist of all time. Ah, well.
