music

Oakland Symphony at the Paramount

A “letter from the Front.”

So I get up in the morning and find that the first thing I want to do is not write a review of the concert I attended the night before. Which is to say I don’t want to get up and immediately assume the pontifical role of critic. Let the sleeping dog lie a little while longer! But it seems a natural thing simply to write you a note about the concert. And there’s this—I find that my memory of such a thing the morning after is a truer impression, that what’s important or meaningful, if anything, about what took place is clearer in the mind. (That’s what sleep does for you?) And that memory, that impression, is an easy thing to share with you.

The reason I went last night to the Paramount was… to go to the Paramount again. It’s been years since I went there, and I don’t remember when I last went there to hear music (and not to see, as well as hear, something like a dance performance). When I walked into the lobby, the old feeling came back—what a wonderful place this is to be! Everywhere one looks or walks the feeling is reinforced, for the theater is all of a piece in its awesome fakery. Not just a jewel, but a whole garish tiara. And it seems to have acquired a quite comfortable patina of age in its latter-day reincarnation. The mohair fabric of its upholstered seats has just the right look and feel from all the backs and behinds that have been in them. Richly patterned carpeting is still plush and unstained despite, what, a thousand rock concerts? And the atmospheric lighting itself evokes days of old. One doesn’t want to leave the place as soon as the concert is over, and I can’t say this of any of the other big barns for the performing arts in the Bay Area.

But, alas, the Paramount is no place to hear music. Not music unamplified, not music coming only from the stage, not music that is not born and enhanced electrically. It was, after all, built to be a movie theater in which the sound of the larger than life images on screen came from speakers all around. The place is the wrong shape and made of the wrong materials for music I want to hear. And it’s way too big. This was how I remembered it, and this is how it was again when I walked into the hall and took a seat in the middle on the main floor for the pre-concert talking and playing. I arrived in time to hear a local high student come out from the wings and play a Chopin Scherzo. He was obviously a gifted pianist, he played this piece very well… but he appeared to be a mile away and sounded even further off. The sound of his grand piano—an instrument for which Chopin did not write but I think would have wanted to live to write for—hardly carried to where I was. It was simply not true to the music, and, indeed, it would have been a truer thing to be sitting at home listening to it on headphones. Which is not the way, pace Glenn Gould, it should be. This did not bode well for the concert that was to come.

Since I was in attendance as a powerful and influential critic, I was given a much better seat for the actual concert, seventh row just left of center. (Not as close, though, as the woman with a companion dog who was seated, with dog, in the front row right below the podium! Never saw that before… and I wandered if there would be some fearful canine interruption if there were high-register pitch problems on the part of some violinist or wind player.) I don’t think I could have had a better seat in the house for this music. But it did prove to be the case that, even this close, the full orchestra sound never did have what some record company used to call “living presence,” and I have to think that under the balcony on the main floor and in the further reaches of that balcony above the sound did not carry in a way that was faithful to the music. And that’s music for a symphony orchestra—for sure this is no place for any singer or instrumentalist unamplified.

Well, another reason I went to the concert was the curiosity I had to hear how a world premiere of a piece for orchestra would fare on a program which otherwise was comprised of two established and well-loved works long in the repertory. A new piece by a rather unknown composer, too. I can understand such a composer glad to have his work not relegated to a program of all new music that is likely to be not well attended, yet apprehensive at how his piece can make a favorable impression stacked up next to familiar, anticipated masterpieces. This new piece, Double Identity, by a forty-something German composer, Benedikt Brydern, was the first thing on the program. A three-movement suite in which the composer, who lives in L.A. and writes for movies and television, attempts to bring swing jazz and bebop into a classical setting. That’s what he said in his notes, anyway. Well, as a certain jazz immortal said, “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” And I have to say this piece most definitely does not swing. You can draw you own conclusion as to its quantity of meaning. Its ersatz, overblown and over strung fakery was instantly apparent, so I hunkered down in my seat and looked up at the Paramount’s remarkably sculpted ceiling to have something to keep my attention for its duration. I’m sure Mr. Brydern is a nice man—through the Rotary Club of Hollywood, of all places, he has helped to provide free music lessons for children—and I’m sure he is a quite capable instrumentalist (violinist), as all Hollywood players have to be. But this music of his was a piece of hackwork of the sort that comes with the territory. For the little while I listened I thought I could have been hearing a medley of motifs from the title music of old TV shows like Peter Gunn. When it was over he came out all smiles and waved happily at an applauding crowd.

This new piece had a tough act to precede, Strauss’s great tone poem depicting the tragi-comic career of Don Quixote—in a matter of seconds the foregoing World Premiere piece was forgotten, gone forever, and I settled in to listen to real music. As it happens, this music of Strauss is also a great piece of movie music that one can listen to without having to put up with some inane Hollywood epic. You can see it in your own mind, such is the skill and power of the composer’s musical visualizing (and this concert was, according to the program, a presentation of Musical Visionaries). And yet, as one listens one does not necessarily have to envision the doomed don. The music succeeds as a more abstract evocation of adventure, quest, crisis and what seems at the end like peace. But, sorry to say, the Oakland East Bay Orchestra lacks resources of sonority and virtuosity, particularly in its strings, to fully realize this music (and it’s not just remembering the sound of orchestras of Dresden and Chicago that makes it sound so).

The first cellist of the orchestra played the title role of Quixote, and his was a section leader’s, not a soloist’s performance. That’s an approach that can work—the cello then is first among equals, but just another of the instruments bringing into being the conductor’s idea of the work. You can listen to Toscanini to hear it that way. It’s steady, driven, intense—and altogether good. But the cellist this night too often lacked presence; the sound was thin and remote, smothered in the texture, not the voice of a protagonist. The orchestra otherwise was not up to showing off the full range of color and wit and sheer cleverness of Strauss’s score, and I listened to it as if at a distance. Until the very ending, one of the most redemptive passages in all of this great composer’s music, which was in fact touchingly played by cellist and orchestra as well. It was a long wait, but they did come through. Finally.

Adam Neiman

Second half of the program was the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto. (Well, the first one… for those who keep count.) I had thought this would fill out the first half instead, because Don Quixote is such a whole world of feeling unto itself that it should stand alone. The Tchaikovsky concerto, undoubted masterpiece though it is, is not such a complete work of art. Yet its brilliance, even its famous opening, might have knocked that world-premiere piece into oblivion even quicker. The soloist, Adam Neiman (who did walk on stage alone, unlike the cellist Dan Reiter, who made no entrance from the wings), I had not heard before. From the start, and all the way through, he played cleanly, strongly, altogether quite objectively. He was brilliant as need be. But there was nothing of striking originality to one who has heard this music half a hundred times (and loves it none the less for that), no expressive phrasing of familiar tunes or probing of a counter-subject, no touches of virtuoso diablerie or thunder in the octaves. And, again, the sound—of a piece like this especially—did not have the impact it should have on someone as close as the seventh row (where the view of his fast-moving fingers was more thrilling, even, than the sound they were producing). Michael Morgan at times seemed to be importuning, vainly, a more expressive accompaniment. I would hear the pianist on this occasion play the work again—or any other work, for that matter—in a different space. Would I say the same of the orchestra? The conductor? Well, maybe…

I wanted to say something about George Gershwin, who I’ve listened to a lot in the last week or two. His own playing, that is, of his own music. He came to mind while listening, for as long as I did, to the world-premiere piece. Because Gershwin did what this guy was trying to do. Only a lot better. And just as Gershwin’s great Rhapsody sounds truer to its considerable musical content when played by a salon orchestra (v. his own abridged versions or one by M.T. Thomas), so Double Identity might have done better with the same. Less is more, that sort of thing. And it provides a certain ironic distance that makes the feeling of the music more genuine. Ah, Gershwin, what a pianist! In his handling of rhythm and voices and, yes, polyphony another pianist comes to mind who had the same initials and also died much too young…

—Carl W. Johnson

A version of this article appeared in the Piedmont Post. Photo of pianist Adam Neiman.