Philadelphia Orchestra
James Conlon (conductor)
Alban Gerhardt (cello)
21 October 2005 - Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center, Philadelphia
Most conductors have pet musical passions, but few risk exercising them during prestigious guest conducting gigs with the Philadelphia Orchestra. James Conlon, mensch that he is, put his baton where his mouth so often is by devoting
his symphonic prime time (the concert's second half) to the orchestra's first performances of The Mermaid by Alexander Zemlinsky.
This music is thoroughly approachable and has been recorded by Conlon and others. But Zemlinsky isn't an easy sell here. Some listeners departed at intermission on Friday after a satisfying Dvorák Cello Concerto. And they missed a marvel — Zemlinsky at his most endearing and the Philadelphia Orchestra in top form.
Premiered in 1905 but lost until 1984, The Mermaid is a melding of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, composer Zemlinsky's heartbreak over his ill-fated love for the future Mrs. Gustav Mahler (Alma Schindler), and musical antecedents such as Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony. Diminutive and un-charismatic, Zemlinsky identified with the freakish side of Andersen's mermaid, whose musical portrayal here is far from Disney and more in the spirit of Edvard Munch's 1896 painting Mermaid, now on exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art: She's wary, tense and has homicidal tendencies. That image, expressed through well-honed water imagery, is superimposed like a double-exposure photograph over Zemlinsky's turn-of-the-century Vienna, waltzes and all.
Conlon convincingly weighted the music more toward the Andersen-related descriptive elements. And though Zemlinsky is often conducted as a constantly unfurling Wagnerian web, Conlon heeded the score's discrete partitions that divide the piece into modules. Each took on its own tint, character and various degrees of rubato. The Philadelphia Orchestra's plush sound was a plus here, but the heft it gave to the piece's less-audible undercurrents was more valuable.
The Dvorák Cello Concerto enjoyed a thoroughly absorbing treatment. Memories of the late cellist Jacqueline du Pré's benchmark performances of the piece are hard to abolish: She played the composer's fusion of lyricism and anthemlike nationalism with unshakable surety. Doubt and shadows crept into the interpretation of Alban Gerhardt, the young Berlin-born cellist who was Friday's soloist. The piece thus had different kinds of emotional events packed into an extremely concentrated melodic line. Yet much of the performance's tension came from Gerhardt's sense of emotional self-containment within a tight, formal frame, as evidenced by the steely logic he gave to transitions. He's a major personality, even if his tone isn't exceptional.
Also, both Gerhardt and Conlon tapped the histrionic potential of their hair. It shook and flew all over the place, and in this former second home of Riccardo Muti, we like that.
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