“Without drama there is no art.” Picasso said that, or something like that. You get the idea. It’s an artistic dictum that came to mind after the Beethoven/Schubert concert, which just concluded this morning. You didn’t need a donut – although we were all grateful they were here – to experience the drama that made the art in Powell Symphony Hall.
Featured soloist Julia Fischer took the stage in a black velvety gown; her face, when in repose, like a Botticellian angel. When she and the orchestra launched into the jaunty theme of the final movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, Fischer was beaming. And when she leaned into her final cadenza, you felt everyone on stage and in the hall sit up and take special notice – extraordinary volume and color emerging from the fragile instrument in her hands -- the mesmerizing drama that is art.
At intermission, I spoke with our whipsmart Assistant Conductor Scott Parkman, who provided me with a little context for the Schubert. He considers Emmanuel Krivine to be of the crème de la crème of conductors (David Halen seconded this opinion after the concert). “The Great” Symphony, Parkman told me, can be deadly – too often played as a dense, slow, heavy Germanic work. Krivine fathoms the Viennese lightness of the Schubert Ninth.
Krivine is not a hugely demonstrative conductor. At times I hardly noticed he was there. Then he would make some small expressive gesture, as when his hands would rapidly flutter toward the woodwinds like a flurry of sparrow’s wings.
Rapturous this “Great” Symphony was, with all the drama great art requires.
I will be away at the beginning of next week. My next installment will be Wednesday, December 8, which is the day John Lennon died. It says something about me and my generation, I suppose, that the dates I remember most, pre-September 11, are November 22 and December 8.
