LAPO

Cellists like to complain about the paucity of concertos for their instrument.
And yet they have the Dvorak, and few concertos for any instrument are as
rapturously beautiful as that supremely eloquent work.
Lynn Harrell was the soloist in Dvorak’s concerto this past weekend, and
Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic. If there has been a
more sublime performance of anything at the Music Center this season, it has
escaped these ears. As a solo performance, as a collaboration between soloist
and conductor, as a study in give-and-take between soloist and orchestra, this
was music-making of the highest order. On Saturday night the crowd cheered
itself hoarse at the end. Even more remarkable, however, was the audience’s
respectful, cough-free silence throughout the performance.
Harrell has played the concerto, as all cellists must, throughout his career;
he has recorded it twice. Even so, there was a new dimension to his latest
performance, a breadth in the rhetoric, a long and consistent line of thought,
that represent something of a milestone for him.
The touchstone for any performance of this work is the moment midway in the
first movement where the cello and a solo flute converse, quietly but
ecstatically. As Harrell and the orchestra’s flutist Janet Ferguson entered
into this conversation, the drab concert hall suddenly became an enchanted
place, with moonbeams everywhere.
The whole performance, in fact, seemed motivated by a sense of intimacy, of
creating chamber music on a grandiose but heartfelt level. Between the
strapping Harrell and the diminutive Ashkenazy there is considerable distance.
Where the Dvorak concerto was concerned, however these gifted musicians saw eye
to eye.
Otherwise, the evening held few charms. It may be possible, in fact, to chart
civilization’s advance by how abominable William Walton’s “Wise Virgins”
ballet music now sounds, half a century after its creation. In 1940 there
seemed little harm in the composer’s taking on a clutch of arias and choruses
from Bach cantatas and recasting them for full orchestra; now the work comes
across as a grotesque and cruel insult to the source material. Ashkenazy and
the orchestra gave it the full treatment, including a Paganini-sized vibrato in
Sidney Weiss’ violin solo in the “Sheep May Safely Graze” segment.
Then there was some original Walton, the clattery and bombastic Second Symphony
of 1960, a sad landmark in the creative decline in Walton’s late years. Had the
composer assimilated a surfeit of tinsel from his years as a movie composer? Or
was he simply written out? The Philharmonic had celebrated Walton’s music
properly a few weeks ago, with the marvelous Viola Concerto of 1929. That is
where matters should have ben left.