The Real Deal
Oksana Lyniv is the real deal; much sharper detail and vocabulary in her gestures than the musicians have been used to for the past 14 year.
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s program Saturday night at Strathmore was a little bit of this n’ that, lacking cohesion or even suggestive contrasts, but it was performed well, with the remarkable Angel Blue as soloist and an intriguing, impressive debut by Ukrainian guest conductor Oksana Lyniv.
Nicolai Gogol’s 1842 novella Taras Bulba offers a romantic gloss on quasi-historical events. The tale of the Cossack chief who kills his own son for switching sides (for love) in a war against the Poles has inspired at least three major films and an opera, in addition to a three-movement rhapsody by Leoš Janáček (for some reason, the printed program announced a different work by the same composer). Janáček was a strange case indeed; virtually every piece for which he is known today (including five operas, chamber music, and the stunning Sinfonietta) were written after age 60, when most other composers had either died or stopped producing. His insecurity led to constant revisions of his output – a nightmare for editors and publishers today. But he was a diamond in the rough, an ethnomusicologist well before Bartók and Kodály brought attention to the field, and a voice of sometimes jaw-dropping originality.
Taras Bulba, an impressionistic mimesis of the story, is in Janáček’s typically aphoristic style, with fast ostinato figures underpinning jagged, declamatory motifs. His melodies always seem unfinished, and episodes follow one another kaleidoscopically, often turning back on one another. The effect is disorienting, but sometimes powerful. Lyniv led the BSO through this unfamiliar score with vigorous authority, and the many individual solos were quite fine, including the double-bass.
Blue, whose radiant soprano illuminates everything she sings, offered a bewitching reading of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which sets a passage from James Agee’s 1935 prose-poem. The piece is evocative, gentle, and heart-felt, though this is one of those rare instances where the beauty of the text eclipses that of the music. For instance, Barber’s depiction of the streetcar is jarring and off-putting where the text incurvates and surges with a variety of colorful images (his music here also sounding quite a bit like Copland to whom Barber always expressed indifference). But this is a minor masterpiece of Americana, and hearing it from such a graceful singer was a pleasure; Blue’s voice is not only powerful, it is strikingly colorful. Sadly, her follow-up, a brief excerpt from Terence Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones, was static and disappointing. I don’t know the opera, but I hope the rest of it carries more interest than this trifle.
After intermission Lyniv and the BSO wallowed in Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2, chocolate fudge covered with caramel smothered in whipped cream. The piece is full of the composer’s most appealing melodic ideas, but there isn’t enough textual or rhythmic variety to support its substantial length. Too many instruments are playing all the time, and the impression becomes that of a clogged, oleaginous river; even the glorious Adagio starts to wear out its welcome before it ends. But there are certainly tunes to hum, and the musicians clearly enjoyed sinking their collective teeth into it.
As for Lyniv, she is the real deal; much sharper detail and vocabulary in her gestures than the musicians have been used to for the past 14 years. She does different things with her hands, communicating large lines and small details simultaneously. She sometimes goes “overboard” – gesturing so extravagantly that the musical result makes the effort seem impotent. And as both a player and an audience member, I detest the affectation of putting down the baton and using just her hands for “lyrical” spots. This performative schtick began with Bernstein, I believe, but has infected some conductors ever since. Stokowski, Mitropoulos, and Boulez had no trouble achieving whip-crack ensemble without a baton, so it’s clear that any competent conductor can get what they want either with or without. Just make up your mind and lose the exhibitionism!
That aside, I tip my hat to the conductor; she is a fine, substantive musician, and I hope they have her back often.
Photo of Oksana Lyniv by Gerhard Flekatsch.
