REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ILYA GRINGOLTS/GEORGE HANSON

posted by James Reel

    An impassioned performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony more than redeemed last night’s Tucson Symphony concert under George Hanson, a concert whose first half was dissatisfying despite good playing.
    The trouble started right away, with a well-paced, crisply delivered performance of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain in its Rimsky-Korsakov orchestration for brass, percussion, flutes and first violins. At least that’s how it sounded, despite the visual evidence of a full orchestra hard at work. For at least the first third of the piece, the low strings lacked the heft to give the music its needed menace, and in tutti passages all you could hear from the woodwinds was a piccolo shrieking to be rescued from the sonic muck. Solos came across better, but when the orchestra played at full force, the sound turned to sludge.
    This has been a problem for the woodwinds for the past couple of seasons. Either Hanson needs to rethink his balances, or I need to abandon my balcony seat in what used to be the hall’s sweet spot.
    Aural congestion was much less of a problem as the concert progressed, mainly because of the different ways the composers themselves deployed the orchestra. Yet Ilya Gringolts’ performance with the orchestra of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 was also, if not unsatisfying, disquieting. There’s no faulting Gringolts' technique, and he is certainly a young soloist with ideas. His and Hanson’s approach to the concerto was compelling, if you don’t mind Prokofiev played in the style of Shostakovich. Gringolts’ expansive, searching treatment of the opening material set the tone for the work’s first two movements, a performance that conveyed the depressive brooding of Shostakovich rather than the contemplative mystery of Prokofiev; it’s a subtle but key stylistic difference. In the slow movement, Gringolts played one separate, dying phrase after another, surrendering to Prokofiev’s long-lined lyricism only when sent to a high tessitura. In the more upbeat final movement, Prokofiev’s mischief turned to frantic desperation. The approach was highly effective in its way, but not entirely relevant to the work at hand.
    After intermission, Hanson and the orchestra proved to understand Tchaikovsky’s Fourth through and through. On the way to the concert, my wife, unsure of the program, asked, “Are they playing the sad Tchaikovsky symphony?” I replied, “No, they’re doing the noisy one.” Many performances of this symphony merely ride on the adrenalin of the blaring fanfares that dominate the first and last movements; while Hanson and the TSO gave these passages their full due, they realized that there’s also a great deal of drama and development to be found elsewhere in the score.
    For example, the performance emphasized the swaying, sighing lyricism of much of the first movement’s material, and even in the development section’s most turbulent passages, phrasing remained highly attentive; nobody was going to be content just to blast away. Oh, the forces could muster power aplenty when necessary; at the very end, they delivered a blazing coda worthy of Yevgeny Mravinsky, and stayed together much better than Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic did some 45 years ago. Whatever reservations one might have about the concert’s first half, this performance of the Tchaikovsky symphony made it a rewarding evening.