Tonight was the first concert in my subscription series for the current season at the Philadelphia Orchestra. I lost my long-time seat-mate this summer — not by misplacing him, or on a mysterious desert island, or over the river Styx (or even Dennis DeYoung). We’re simply non legato now, which means I had an extra ticket for this evening’s performance.
I put off thinking about the tickets throughout the summer months, until they finally arrived some weeks ago in the mail. I hesitated to ask friends if they would like to join me, feeling odd and displaced, as though the other ticket still had someone’s name on it. But as this first concert drew closer, I began asking.
That’s when the No’s started. I had waited a long time, too long, and everyone had conflicts:
- A shared-custody parent who had her child at home tonight
- An alto with church choir rehearsal tonight
- An audiophile with a marked indifference to violin soloists
- A bass with church choir rehearsal tonight
- An audiophile with a backlog of packing for a plane flight tomorrow
- A lapsed martial artist with an unbreakable gym date
- An Orchestra fan who had Shostak-O.D.’ed earlier in the week
So I went by myself. Attendance was surprisingly light, particularly for a series-opening concert featuring a relatively high-profile soloist, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. A smaller, chamber-sized set of musicians opened with Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 2, and within several bars I remembered how tepid I generally feel about the Orchestra performing early or Baroque music. An old chestnut, rendered mealy by soggy tempi, indifferent bowing, and mushy attacks. It was also somewhat disconcerting to see NSS actually hitching up her pants onstage before digging into her solos, many of which involved her bobbling back and forth like a lepruchaun at a hoe-down.
As far as I’m concerned, musicians can dress or move however they want if the sound still comes through. At points, I closed my eyes to try to focus on the music itself. While the music pops into high relief in the dark, so does audible audience misbehavior, and tonight was a doozy. There was all the usual hack-coughing, outright talking, and cell phone twittering, despite repeated reminders that the performance was being recorded. But the woman to my left took the cake — during the quietest movements of the second piece, the Assad Violin Concerto, she began ripping pages out of her program book one by one and stuffing them into her purse. “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn off your cellular phones and pagers, but feel free to hand-craft piñatas at your leisure.”
Given my crankiness, I was surprised by what happened after intermission. The Orchestra launched into Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, and it hauled. There’s plenty of string-heavy orchestration, and will-ye, nill-ye, those folks can still Phill-ye. The Fabulous Philadelphians know how to saw like nobody’s business: you can measure the power of the music by the sheer silence everywhere else in the hall. Respiratory ailments clear. Paper stays put. Fidgeting ceases.
“I wanted to convey in the Symphony how, through a series of tragic conflicts of great inner spiritual turmoil, optimism asserts itself as a world view,” Shostakovich said. Well, if it can actually make hundreds of Philadelphians sit quietly for any stretch of time, there’s hope for us all.
Comments(1) 