Spirit of Stokowski stirs in Academy of Music
The Philadelphia Inquirer Blog - Artswatch
Spirit of Stokowski stirs in Academy of Music
Peter Dobrin, Inquirer Classical Music Critic
Toting Mickey Mouse dolls and donning Lilly Pulitzer shifts, the city’s youngest classical music fans made for a gorgeous spectacle Saturday morning filing into the Academy of Music. Yes, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s family concert was returning just this once to the Academy, which the ensemble largely left behind in 2001 for more acoustically advanced environs down the block.
The Academy is “still a little bit our home,” the orchestra’s next music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, told the audience.
Funny that when this orchestra needs to put across a sense of occasion, the Academy is the only place that can truly answer the call. Better acoustics? No thanks. Children today have no doubt achieved honors as the most technologically jaded yet. And yet, the charms of a 155-year-old concert hall were not beyond them. When the Academy’s lowered chandelier – bathed in purple tones – rose to signal the start of the concert, the audience oohed and applauded.
In abundant supply was the sure sign of success of anything aimed at children: that observed moment when the book, movie or show has also absorbed the adults. The ostensible reason for the one-hour concert was to celebrate Leopold Stokowski’s ascent to the podium a century ago. But for this audience of children – and many grandparents – there was little mention of the maestro. That was fine. The best way to look back at someone whose greatest contribution was looking forward is, in fact, to look forward. If the orchestra can consistently keep children as rapt as it did on this Saturday, it will have gone a long way to arresting audience drain.
Any number of octogenarians will tell you that Stokowski’s concerts for children – his charisma, his gift for theater – had a lot to do with developing a deep connection to classical music. The concert was framed not as a recreation of one of those legendary events, but as a nod to Stokowski’s more ambitious embrace of the masses: Fantasia (1940). In excerpts, the orchestra and Nézet-Séguin occupied the stage, performing with the film on a medium-sized but bright screen above. For all of its lack of sonic impact, the Academy of Music and its current stage shell do convey one of the orchestra’s most valuable assets, its homogeneity. The strings were not as cohesive as you might have wanted in Stokowski’s orchestration of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, but the winds glowed as a beautifully blended organ.
Having to pace himself with the film, Nézet-Séguin was in essence recreating Stokowski’s tempos rather than turning in interpretive sole-authorship. He was a good sport for going along with it, even when he found his leadership several seconds behind the action in movements from The Nutcracker. The humor and euphoria of Fantasia come from the fact that animation was conceived in response to specific gestures in the music. For the painful span of several excerpts, squat mushrooms started dancing before the music did, wind gusts shook leaves sooner on screen than in sound.
Mercifully, the cognitive dissonance was resolved for the longer sequence of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, when gods could heave thunder bolts and percussionists wield mallets in perfect accord. Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice easily won in the audience favorite category. Its shadowy, fine-grain images and splashy score have lost absolutely nothing to time.
Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” from Die Walküre was given as a non-Fantasia encore, and came with wan images of fire and ghostly Valkyries projected onto the Academy’s columns on either side of the stage. Unimpressive, this. The most vivid specter of the event was the curator of music. Decades after Stokowski recognized the visceral qualities of popular repertoire, it still is somehow in the air, its emotional vernacular undiminished. PlayStation and Minecraft be damned. On this morning for children, classical was king, and Stokowski still the father of us all.
Stokowski raised the Philadelphia Orchestra to world-class status, bringing superstars to perform with him. Now, we watch in horror as it falls into the abyss of mediocrity.
If YNS can't keep up with a cartoon, how will he keep up with Beethoven?— altekakker- Keeping up with a cartoon - its soundtrack - is not exactly the same as "keeping up" with Beethoven - his written scores.
Maestro Nézet-Séguin has already proved to the music cognizetti that he's more than capable of "keeping up" with the composers he interprets.
Your negativism out does Peter Dobrin here. After all, the would-be-critic actually threw Nézet-Séguin a modest compliment - at least by Dobrin's standards - when he said "He was a good sport for going along with it..."
And for once Dobrin didn't give in to his instinct for gossipy barbs here - there's not a single one re the conductor in this entire article. - this was a technology failure. For whatever reason, the conductor's monitor, a sort of computer screen just behind the podium, which I could see from my chair, and which was normally synced with the big screen, displayed the cues after the big screen did on Saturday morning.
Having played Mozart and Haydn (not to mention Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Back-Stokowski and several others) with Yannick, the orchestra musicians look forward to Beethoven as well. Just don't expect it to sound like Stokie's, Ormandy's, Muti's, Sawallisch', Eschenbach's or Dutoit's Beethoven.— John Koen - AK, I always appreciate reading your intelligent and usually well grounded critiques. But how about a little occasional positivity?
Last night's concert was much better "synched" and the band played quite well, including a Radetsky March encore that had me thinking I was in the Musikverein on New Year's Day. YNS has the audience on his side, the orchestra is cultivating a younger audience and enthusiasm is building. Let's hold off with the wet blankets until November???— salazar - What a sour comment, altekakker, about a happy, inspiring occasion. According to Disney's biographer, Neal Gabler, Stokowski "had to listen to a 'click track' to keep the tempo for the animations" when he led the Philadelphia Orchestra in the original recordings in the Academy, which he apparently chafed at. I doubt if there was any such thing provided for YNS. I salute him for his enthusiastic recognition of his groundbreaking predecessor and hope that he, like Stoki, will, indeed, look forward to bring out the best in our orchestra.— Mswelsh
- Of course Stokowski used a click track; all soundtracks are done that way. The players should have had them, too. I promise you, YNS was embarrassed when the orchestra was chasing Mickey Mouse around the stage.
I don't doubt that he is a good sport, and he may have talent and potential, but we need great concerts performed by great artists, not rehashes, I mean tributes, to someone whose memory has been tarnished by the actions of this board and management. Hiring an unproven talent to bring the orchestra out of the present cesspool is akin to having a talent show when you need a heart transplant.
I hope he works out, but so far I just see a pretender who dances to the music, and without the necessary skills to actually conduct, which he needed to manage the technical challenges of synchronizing audio and video.That the second concert was better only means the first one was not ready. The Philadelphia Orchestra plays great with or without a great conductor on the podium. We run into trouble when near-greats try to impose their wills without the the skills needed to do so. The results speak for themselves.
I promise to say something positive when it happens. There is nothing happy about what's going on at the POA. Get your heads out of the sand.
— altekakker - It is nice a Philadelphia Orchestra musician step up in support of YNS.
He is energetic and engaging, and sort of the opposite of the last two music directors. But he should do better, and always keep in mind that the most accomplished, best trained, most highly skilled people on the stage are the players.
If there was a technical foul-up, it was probably the result of penny-pinching. You need experienced professionals to mount a live multi-media production.
— altekakker - John;
I could see the monitor from the Balcony Saturday night, and the cues were about 90% dead on for Sorceror & Nutcracker. I salute YNS for his flexibility. I remember last spring when he conducted & played the Brandenburg concerto with only a short runthrough on stage without the orchestra, and it was heavenly clockwork. I'm sure Boston would have kidnapped him had we hesitated. (It looks like Robertson or Spano are being hotly courted by the brahmins now.)— salazar - Good news! The bankruptcy is over. Bad news! The salaries and benefits are third-tier. Chicago, NY, Boston and LA all pay almost 50K more. You can't have a world-class orchestra at discount prices. And donors will not support an orchestra with no future.— altekakker
- Thanks.— salazar
Peter Dobrin is a classical music critic and culture writer for The Inquirer. Since 1989, he has written music reviews, features, news and commentary for the paper, covering such topics as the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the Venice Biennale, expansion of the Curtis Institute of Music, the Philadelphia Orchestra's bankruptcy declaration in 2011, Philadelphia's evolving performing arts center and the general health of arts and culture.
Dobrin was a French horn player. He earned an undergraduate degree in performance from the University of Miami, and received a master's degree in music criticism from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with Elliott Galkin. He has no time to practice today.
