Joy and Sadness in Music and Vision 5 febbraio

Joy and Sadness
A shock to the normally conservative audience at
Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia,
reported by GIUSEPPE PENNISI

The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia is one of the oldest and, no doubt, the most prestigious Italian concert institutions. It operates in the Rome Parco della Musica where it can use three different concert halls: for 2,800, 1,200 and 700 listeners. It has a music school and enjoys a tremendous reputation in Italy and abroad. Its main symphony orchestra season spans October to May in the largest of the three halls (the Sala Santa Cecilia) with three subscription series (Saturdays at 6pm, Mondays at 9pm and Tuesdays at 7.30pm). Ticket and subscription prices are high, even though there are special discounts for students and senior citizens. In Rome, it is often a matter of prestige to be a subscriber to the main symphony program of the Academy. In the orchestra and in the central tier, most of the audience dresses up; during intermissions, the 'Rome-that-matters' chats not only about music but also about power politics and business. Thus, it is natural that the program tends to be conservative. Although, it is always of high quality, M&V reports on it solely for special circumstances -- eg the production of all Mahler's symphonies and lieder in 2010-2011, and world premieres of prominent composers such as Hans Werner Henze.
Things have changed since 1 October 2005, when Antonio Pappano became the Academy's musical director. The Academy introduced top notch concert operas and, more significantly, contemporary composers -- always performed, but nearly always relegated to the smaller halls -- to the 2,800 seat Sala Santa Cecilia.
Within this context, it is worth reporting about the program performed on 28, 30 and 31 January. On 30 January 2012, I was in a good orchestra seat (row 14, seat 27), one of the best places acoustically in such a large hall.

Philippe Jordan (left), Martin Grubinger (right) and members of the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia at the Parco della Musica auditorium in Rome on 28 January 2012. Photo © 2012 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution
The conductor was not Pappano but thirty-seven-year-old Philippe Jordan whose baton we admired last Autumn in Der Rosenkavalier at La Scala [Time is a Strange Thing, 8 October 2011] but the real star was young percussionist Martin Grubinger. Born in Salzburg, and now in his late twenties, Grubinger is a real shaman of sounds. He received standing ovations and had to oblige with two encores.

Martin Grubinger in action at the Parco della Musica auditorium in Rome on 28 January 2012. Photo © 2012 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution
The program included the first performance in Italy of John Corigliano's Conjurer, a concerto for percussion instruments and orchestra, and the Dmitry Shostakovich Symphony No 10 in E minor. Two very different compositions.
The former is a recent example of American eclectic style. John Corigliano is in his mid-seventies and has been on the US music scene for several decades. Basically, he is a tonal neo-romantic with a good sense of humor; his opera The Ghost of Versailles, well received at the Metropolitan Opera House, is an elegant parody of seventeenth century operatic conventions. He does not belong to any avant-garde school but he is, of course, familiar with contemporary trends. He was commissioned to write a concerto for percussion, strings and brass orchestra by the Pittsburgh Symphonic Orchestra for the inauguration of its 2007-2008 season. Corigliano has composed several concerti where a soloist (eg a violinist) was in a dialogue with the orchestra, but it was the first time he had to face a confrontation between the orchestra and a percussionist. Thus a special instrument had to be conceived and built: a long percussion machine which would include wood (first movement), metal (second movement) and leather (third movement). The instrument requires a strong and agile percussionist who could jump up and down to the various sections while the string and brass orchestra interact with him. The unifying element is a simple interval of a fifth which becomes the source of all thematic elements. Naturally, there are evocations of ancient percussion elements (eg the African kalunga). The concerto starts with a vibrant joyful beginning and ends with a dark sad conclusion. Of course, the mastery of Martin Grubinger was an essential element to the appreciation by an audience normally accustomed to Mozart and Beethoven.
The ambiguity between the explosion of joy and sadness is also a key element of Shostakovich's Symphony No 10, not standard fare of the Academy, where it has been performed only six times (three in the last thirty years). It is a monumental fifty-five-minute work. Composed in 1953, just after Stalin's death, it meant the release from a period where Shostakovich (and many other intellectuals) had had a lot of suffering. The first movement (Moderato) lasts over twenty minutes. Under Jordan's baton, the melodic lines proceed in anxious, groping, step-wise progress; chromatic, diatonic and modal elements are kept in constant tension. In the second and the third movements (Allegro and Allegretto), the weight of the full orchestra creates sinister effects of unease and terror -- the memory of Stalinism -- along with bizarre juxtapositions of very different sonorities -- a touch of irony about Stalinism's pomposity. In the fourth movement, Jordan emphasized the introspective musings.
Copyright © 5 February 2012 Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy

ACCADEMIA NAZIONALE DI SANTA CECILIA
ROME
ITALY
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
RUSSIA
PERCUSSION
ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
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