Last week I saw a concert at Disney Hall one night and at Avery Fisher Hall the next. The LA Phil, at Disney, was in the middle of its Next on Grand festival, a somewhat amorphous but generously proportioned festival of "Contemporary Americans." The event that night was a Green Umbrella show devoted to Dylan Mattingly, Sean Friar, Chris Cerrone, and Jacob Cooper; Mark Swed has a review, and, space permitting, I'll say something in a future column. For the moment, I want to focus on the seemingly trivial matter of the LA Phil's on-site store. Each time I visit, I'm entranced by the sight of CDs, DVDs, music books, and scores. Yes, actual musical scores, for sale in a concert hall! O uncanny apparition!
I remember the late Andrew Porter lamenting, sometime in the late seventies or early eighties, that Fisher lacked such a store. You should be able to buy or browse the scores of that evening's program on site, he said. Needless to say, little has changed. At Fisher itself, the principal reading matter consists of rack upon rack of brochures. The Juilliard Store has an excellent selection of scores, but since the renovation of the Lincoln Center campus it's been harder to reach, and it closes at 7pm or earlier. You could go the Performing Arts Library and check out a score, but that praiseworthy institution is plagued by what I call the Law of Adjacent Abundance: if you're looking for, say, Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, you are almost guaranteed to see four or five copies of the Fifth, and two or three copies of the Seventh, but none of the Sixth. At Disney, you can, indeed, buy scores related to that week's program; there's also a general selection of Dover publications and a few modern items such as Takemitsu's Green. I watched as a man took out Falla's El amor brujo and explained the distribution of the instruments to his young daughter. In classical music, everything revolves around scores. Yet a display such as the one at Disney is rare. Do people buy these scores in great quantity? Probably not, but their presence sends an encouraging message, promoting musical literacy. Let's hope the future Geffen Hall follows suit.
At Avery Fisher, the Philharmonic was performing under the direction of Manfred Honeck. David Allen wrote an enthusiastic review in the Times. He went back two nights later and added a further thought on Twitter: "Honeck's Brahms on Thursday was very interesting. Honeck's Brahms tonight was utterly, unbelievably shattering." I wish I'd heard that later outing; I was sufficiently impressed with the vitality and the stylishness of the playing on the first night. It was, admittedly, a standard-issue, old-fashioned program: the Fledermaus overture, Mozart's Fifth Violin Concerto (with Augustin Hadelich, not quite on his customary form), and the Brahms Fourth. Honeck has been more adventurous in his programming at the Pittsburgh Symphony, although he seems in essence a core-repertory kind of conductor. To be sure, his deconstructive approach to the Mozart Requiem shows that he doesn't always proceed in conservative fashion.
The Brahms is one of my favorite pieces. I'm extremely picky about it, imposing various “checkpoints” that even legendary conductors fail to pass. But Honeck kept me riveted all the way through, even if he was guilty of Overloud Triangle and a few other offenses. The long, effusive lyrical lines put me in mind at times of old Bruno Walter recordings. The aggressive punch of the scherzo smacked of Toscanini. One passage after another "spoke" with idiomatic diction, transcending the fastidious, soulless execution that one hears so often in modern orchestral playing, not least at the Phil. Honeck seems to be on the radar for the music-director search; so is Jaap van Zweden, a somewhat relentlessly hammering conductor who strikes me as Solti lite. If the choice were between those two, I'd vote for Honeck. He is a true musician.
