On Music
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music MAKING MUSIC DANCE by m. anatole gurewitsch JL^^etween the dance and concert stages today, territorial disputes are taking place—largely unacknowledged, it is true, but nevertheless...
...For the conductor, though, the first act is the tougher test...
...Cellist Jules Eskin joins him for the ensuing duet and proves an ideal partner...
...The Toronto Symphony makes a dreary thing of the sultry Arabian Dance (or "Coffee"), and the rhythm in the Dance of the Reed Pipes needs more give...
...The violin solo is entrusted to Joseph Silverstein, who transforms its periods of moody sentimentality into aristocratic eloquence...
...Like Ozawa's Swan Lake, Davis' Nutcracker falters in its divertissements...
...As Davis manages it, the descent from the wondrous to the everyday has a magic of its own...
...When the Christmas tree miraculously grows to gigantic size, Davis' sense of proportion and scale is again in evidence...
...The suspense is sustained through the long, grand crescendo, with eerie breaks of quiet making the crest all the more tremendous...
...The languid tempos Swan Queens favor for fanning into arabesque are not the ones that are likely to yield the full, haunted bitter-sweetness of Tchaikovsky's music...
...Several of these recordings have proved durable in the catalogues, and two new entries should survive as well: Swan Lake by the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa (Deutsche Grammophon 2709099), and The Nutcracker by the Toronto Symphony under Andrew Davis (Columbia Master-works M2 35196...
...Transitions thus acquire a special importance, and it is in the transitions that Davis' success is most apparent...
...The other side of this coin is that few dance companies, if any, have first-class musical talent at their disposal, and the light shed by the dancing is often obscured by the account of the music rising from the pit...
...Twentieth-century choreographers, not content with the repertoire actually composed for them, make free with the length and breadth of the musical literature...
...But, true to the composer's intentions or not, it distorts the shape of Swan Lake—and in the end this break with performance tradition may be as serious a musical miscalculation as it is a dramatic one...
...The ingenious stroke that bent balletic virtuosity to the purposes of the drama was not Tchaikovsky's...
...Sweeping harps and shimmering strings signal the first magical glimpse of the Christmas tree...
...The challenge is to maintain, through pacing and emphasis, a clear dramatic arc in the course of the complex musical argument...
...Ozawa's reading has the grandeur of tragedy, particularly in the final statement of the swan theme, marking the death of Odette...
...Who has the stronger claim to the shared repertoire...
...Incredible as it may seem, the ballet failed at its premiere, and so did The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892...
...In fact, not until after the composer's death were these three works recognized as the masterpieces of their (not overly-crowded or overly-distinguished) genre...
...The score's crowning moment is unquestionably the adagio in the pas de deux for the Sugarplum Fairy and her Cavalier in Act 2. The passage is beautifully handled...
...It may seem finicky to dwell on a single transposition...
...and the assembled troops rise lustily to the skyburst of the climax...
...It was Petipa who took the music for their spotlighted encounter from the first act where it had accompanied a pas de deux for the Prince and an otherwise inconsequential lady of the court...
...To the sophisticated concert-going public, they are not symphonic enough...
...the stinging strings accompanying the celeste of the Sugarplum Fairy...
...It is pleasant to fantasize about an ideal performance uniting the elites of the dance and the music worlds— but in cold reality, the production would never fly...
...and the Mazurka pounds too insistently...
...the chilly brightness of a flying piccolo...
...In the more fulminant passages, the Boston forces are no less effective: The churning tempests arise thrillingly before us...
...The annunciatory trombone calls are deftly understated, and the transformation music begins with plenty of volume to spare...
...Not that we get to hear that much of these scores on the concert stage...
...Ozawa restores the piece to its original position, giving the first act an unexpected, too weighty centerpiece, and robbing the third of a climax that anyone who knows the St...
...The first act alone, with its soaring waltzes and its wonderfully articulate mime, offers ample evidence of his power with the music...
...A few of his tempos, notably in the third-act suite of national dances, will perhaps provoke disagreement: The opening of the Czardas is stolid and uninfected...
...The complete Swan Lake—never to my knowledge conducted by Ozawa in live performance— makes a stunning addition to an eclectic repertoire that has included Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Ravel's L 'enfant et les sortileges, and Act 1 of Wagner's Die Walkure...
...Yet the major orchestras do record them, under the batons of great conductors, too...
...Although certain excerpts (above all the Suite from 77ie Nutcracker) have an independent life as "light classics," the full ballets seldom turn up on programs of "serious" music...
...But these are cavils...
...In the case of ballet music, even if magnificently played, the vision of instrumentalists on the stage performing works like Lesacre duprintemps or The Miraculous Mandarin is obviously not what fueled the imagination of a Stravinsky or a Bartok...
...the Spanish Dance, though sharply defined, proceeds too deliberately and lacks character...
...But these divertissements are surely the weakest pages of the score, remnants of the tradition Tchaikovsky had set out to supersede...
...then the vision fades and, amid plinking pizzicati, Tchaikovsky returns us to the bourgeois household of the Von Stahlbaums...
...The series continues with Tosca this summer at Tanglewood, rather superfluously one would think since Ozawa's soloists—Shirley Ver-rett, Veriano Luchetti and Sherrill Mil-nes—are all well-known Puccini protagonists in the theater...
...There are dimensions to his ballets we forgo, and are willing to forgo, in the theater...
...In any case, it is Ozawa's only strategic error...
...Petersburg version cannot forget...
...Originally, the Prince and Odile enacted their destinies amid the general melee of the ball...
...Petersburg production of 1895, staged by Marius Petipa and Lev Iva-nov, starring Pierina Legnani, prima ballerina assoluta, who startled the world with the unprecedented execution of 32 consecutive fouettes...
...As music director of the Boston Symphony, however, he has made surprising forays into the theatrical realm, combining dramatic flair and instrumental brilliance, frequently with spectacular results...
...Symphonic ensembles, in turn, help themselves to the better ballet music...
...For the music itself to dance, more colorful musicians are required than are commonly found in the pit...
...V Pi or the domestic enchantments of The Nutcracker, qualities of warmth and delicacy are more fitting, and Andrew Davis supplies them in abundance...
...Now often heard in the dance theater, they are usually poorly played...
...To the composer's contemporaries—who preferred their ballet music frothy—the instrumental refinement of Swan Lake (1877) had no special attraction, and they rejected the motivic interweaving that gives the score its sweep and coherence as "too symphonic...
...The surging flow of the cellos catches the music's oceanic movement...
...The symphonic methods pioneered in Swan Lake—the dramatic frame and the musical development fusing into a single form—are here brought to their highest point of refinement...
...Moreover, now that James Levine has the Metropolitan Opera orchestra playing at unanticipated levels of passion and excellence, there can be little felt need for a semistaged Tosca, no matter how illustrious the accompaniment...
...I salute them...
...And Acts 2 and 4, the lakeside or "white" acts, are more compelling still...
...The 32 fouettes occur, as many children know, in the coda of the so-called Black Swan pas de deux, which is the stupendous culmination of the ballet's third act and the pivot of the drama as well: It is in this duet that Prince Siegfried breaks his pledge to the White Swan, Odette, when he gives in to the seductions of her look-alike, the evil Odile...
...On Music MAKING MUSIC DANCE by m. anatole gurewitsch JL^^etween the dance and concert stages today, territorial disputes are taking place—largely unacknowledged, it is true, but nevertheless plain...
...Ozawa's experience in the theater is minimal, and from all accounts his opera work several years back was unexciting...
...The argument advanced for choreographers is that they can illuminate a musical composition, and such masterworks as George Bal-anchine's Concerto Barocco (to J. S. Bach's Double Concerto for Violins) or Divertimento No...
...As far as ballet masters and dancers are concerned, the authentic Swan Lake is the St...
...75 (to the Mozart score) support the proposition...
...Ozawa phrases flow-ingly and unaffectedly, and the famous swan theme blooms forth in majesty and mystery...
...In the inspired passages, Ozawa takes flight...
...Ozawa's Swan Lake follows the sequence of Tchaikovsky's score prepared and published as a piano reduction before the ballet's world premiere in Moscow...
...if they sound trivial, that is no disgrace to the conductor...
...A reader of the fine and fuzzy print on the album jacket will discover that this recording was made possible through the financial assistance of the Toronto Symphony Women's Committee...
...Tchaikovsky's great ballet scores have from the time of their creation been condemned to a particularly irreconcilable and unsatisfying double life...
...They come honestly by their civic pride...
...It is not quite the work we are familiar with from the theater...
...Most of the details that stick in the mind from Davis' performance are to be cherished: the tiny added weight at the end of a tattoo on the snare drum...
Vol. 63 • June 1980 • No. 10
