Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

The Los Angeles Philharmonic season has gotten off to a particularly slow start this Fall with five weeks of performances under music director Gustavo Dudamel. Despite two premieres, the shows have featured uninspired programming made worse last week by the cancellation of pianist Yefim Bronfman. Of course, you can still read all of the orchestra’s latest talking points as repeated by the major press organizations in town: Dudamel is a rock star, the orchestra is blowing the roof off of Disney Concert Hall, etc. You can even hear about how Dudamel has won classical music’s equivalent of America’s Got Talent, the Gramophone Artist of the Year Award. But the musical performances have been lacking and the shine of the orchestra’s hot new conductor is starting to fade. Dudamel’s concerts, although still better attended than anything else on the schedule, are no longer certain sell-outs. Or at least there are enough available tickets that somebody felt the need to hire a local social marketing PR firm a few weeks ago to get the word out about all the available tickets for the L.A. Phil shows Dudamel’s been leading this month. Meanwhile inside the concert hall, hype continues to outpace delivered goods at least 2 to 1.

And so it was this weekend with a show the L.A. Phil will take to San Francisco on Sunday featuring an uninspiring performance of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 and a new work from Enrico Chapela –MAGNETAR, a concerto for electric cello and orchestra composed for soloist Johannes Moser. Following the second John Adams’ fanfare this month, Moser arrived on stage with the instrument in question on Friday and talked up Chapela’s music. We were told that unlike so many contemporary composers who write for the future, a stance that as you might guess is purportedly detrimental to music, Chapela writes for today. And if writing for today means writing short-lived, inconsequential music, in this particular case, I suppose he does. The concerto certainly wasn’t serious music. And by serious, I mean good. MAGNETAR starts out with the musicians in the orchestra rubbing their hands together, clapping, and snapping their fingers. All of this probably sounded cool, but you couldn’t hear any of it over the laughter in the audience on Friday. The following three movements were mostly marked by an indifference to the unique musical qualities of the electric instrument. Outside of a few sound effects, there seemed little about the solo part that couldn’t have just as easily been played on a standard cello and probably more clearly heard by the audience. It was also odd that Chapela’s piece seemed oblivious to the significant literature for electronic string instruments including Adams’ own The Dharma at Big Sur, which helped usher in the Walt Disney Concert Hall itself. The concerto was little more than a musical pastiche of jazzy interludes and watered down Led Zeppelin that neither rocked nor sang.

Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5 in the second half of the program was stronger, but burdened with Dudamel’s many interpretive foibles. The first movement started out inexplicably slowly and the chronic balance problems soon resurfaced. Major themes were just as likely to be buried under supporting material as not in both the third and fourth movements. And the memory of performances from the Mariinsky Orchestra in Southern California earlier this week emphatically underlined the lack of anything even approaching a Russian sound in the performance. Of course, that’s not really a fair comparison, but there is still a tendency under Dudamel for everyone to be playing his or her little heart out without enough regard to the bigger picture. As discouraging as all this was, there were clearly people who couldn’t get enough of it all on Friday, clapping in any available silent space in the performance giving their own unique touch to the iTunes recording being made that evening. But that may be the price of being America's populist orchestra.

Labels: LA Philharmonic 11/12