TPO Ends the Season with a Bang

MACM Hall. Mahidol University. Nakhonpathom, Thailand. September 22, 2012. For its final concert of the 2011-2012 season, chief conductor Gudni Emilsson turned to two major works, Beethoven's 5^th piano concerto, with German pianist Rolf-Dieter Arens as soloist, and Shostakovich's 12^th symphony. It's been a wonderful and exciting season, and the orchestra, which starts its next season on November 9, deserves a little time off, although its loyal audience will miss them.

I've heard and liked Rolf-Dieter Arens in two piano recitals he's performed in Bangkok. He's a solid pianist of the "old school," which distains showmanship and concentrates on tone and authenticity. Beethoven forms part of his core classical repertoire, and his technique should have been strong enough for him to give a beautiful and fluid reading of this difficult work, but, alas, it didn't seem up to the task. He excelled in proportionality, by which I mean that the loud passages were proportionate to the soft passages, and the fast parts of the work were proportionate to the slow parts, and his tone, especially in the second movement, was beautiful. But he was hesitant and insecure in many of the demanding sections, and the fact that he hit more than a usual number of wrong notes, or missed notes here and there, didn't help. In all, a disappointing, weak performance. 

Shostakovich's 12^th symphony is mired in political controversy, which is no surprise inasmuch as Shostakovich dedicated the symphony to Lenin, named the symphony "The Year of 1917," and gave titles (e.g., "The Dawn of Humanity")to each of the four movements, relating to Lenin and the 1917 Russian revolution. When Shostakovich wrote his 12^th symphony in 1961, he had joined the Communist Party just the year before. Given these circumstances, it was quite natural that critics in the West branded the 12^th symphony as communist propaganda. However, over the years, various musicologists have analyzed the symphony and Shostakovich's life, which was made miserable by the Communist authorities, and have found evidence of anti-Soviet themes within the work. Recent critics and audiences have been more receptive to the symphony. My view is that music is pure sound and emotion, and even where the composer himself provides a "program" for the work, it is the music itself, and not the supposed story of the music, which is determinative. Under the expert direction of Gudni Emilsson, and splendid solo playing by many of the TPO's first chairs, as well as by the large ensemble required for this gigantic work, the TPO delivered a blockbuster of a musical performance. Shostakovich's 12^th symphony maybe be crass, but it is exciting and exacting. The closing five minutes or so are as about as energetic as music gets, and it is a compliment to this fine orchestra and fine conductor to say that it ended this 7^th season of its existence with a bang.