January 29 & 30, 2022
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta, GA
David Danzmayr, conductor; Saleem Ashkar, piano.
SIBELIUS: Finlandia
GRIEG: Piano Concerto
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 6 “Pathétique”
Mark Gresham | 1 FEB 2022
It was an unusual week for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It was the first the orchestra would perform to an in-person audience in the new calendar year. Two earlier January concerts were rescheduled as “virtual-only” events due to a recent infection spike in the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to the rapid spread of the virus’ Omicron variant.
For this past weekend’s concert, the scheduled guest conductor, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, could not perform in these concerts due to illness. Instead, David Danzmayr, in his first season as music director of the Oregon Symphony, led the ASO in an updated program in which Finlandia by Jean Sibelius took the place of Lili Boulanger’s Of a Spring Morning as the opening work.
The changes also involved moving the ASO’s usual Thursday evening concert to Sunday afternoon, resulting in the unusual combination of Saturday and Sunday for classical series performances. For purpose of review we chose to attend the Sunday afternoon performance.
Finlandia began impressively enough in its first dozen or so opening bars. But it then proceeded to take a more slack jaunt down a well-trodden path. It left an energetic but otherwise ordinary impression, depending on volume more than anything for its effect. That seemed to foreshadow the rest of the concert to some degree.
Danzmayr and the ASO turned next to Grieg’s Piano Concerto featuring the young Nazarene pianist Saleem Ashkar as soloist.
Ashkar’s playing was solid and lean but rather ordinary. He avoided extremes of showy excess. He did achieve the grandness that the piece makes easily reachable for the pianist but rarely did he (nor Danzmayr, for that matter) dig all that deeply into other expressive elements or achieve a personal voice. Perhaps the familiarity alone makes that easy to skip over while still pleasing the public. Bit the real challenge for the performer is to go beyond that.
After intermission came Tchaikovsky’s Symphopny No. 6 (“Pathétique”). The first movement limbered along without much focus. The Allegro con grazia that followed was brisk enough to lose the con grazia element several blocks behind it in the street. The third movement roughly shoved its way to a forceful conclusion, which came across to some audience as if the end of the work, which, of course, it was not. Yet its bang-up ending set off a flurry of applause, as if it were all over. It might as well have been. Had one not already wondered about Danzmayr’s concept of Tchaikovsky’s final symphony, the remainder put it more fully into question.
The final movement felt on its own as if orphaned from the rest of the work. That was doubly unfortunate that although the symphony ends quietly at nearly inaudible levels in the lower strings, an interminable silence followed. Had it not been such a familiar piece, one might have thought that something had gone wrong with the performance. But Danzmayr’s hand gesture had called for it. The long silence became palpably gratuitous and artificial, feeling bizarrely out of place.
Nevertheless, it felt great to be back in Symphony Hall. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: aso.org
- David Danzmayr: danzmayr.eu
- Saleem Ashkar: saleemashkar.com
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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