REVIEW: STEVEN MOECKEL/DAVID LOCKINGTON/TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
posted by James Reel
The Tucson Symphony’s season-closing program consists of one masterpiece, one mantelpiece and a curio. It was an all-English program, so that’s par for the course.
First, the curiosity: the concert overture The Gale of Life, written last year by Philip Sawyers, and given only its second performance last night by the TSO under guest conductor David Lockington. It’s a symphonic scherzo inspired by lines drawn from A.E. Houseman’s On Wenlock Edge. It begins and ends with brash, syncopated storm music; the eye of the storm is a long period of respite in the middle. This may be new English music, but it sounds precisely like something that might have been written 40 years ago by Robert Ward, a determined American tonalist. Lockington remarked before the piece that Sawyers is a composer inspired by the Second Vienna School, an influence absolutely undectible in this piece, unless you count a spot of oozing chromaticism in the middle section; still, this is something that more likely dripped off John Foulds’ conservative Dynamic Triptich rather than some Second Vienna score. The piece concludes with a paraphrase, not quite a direct quotation, of the end of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Will all these influences in play, it’s difficult to tell who Philip Sawyers really is from this single work.
Though played well in terms of technique, The Gale of Life would have benefited from a performance with a bit more snarl, and that was also the trouble at the beginning of the masterly Symphony No. 4 of Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the tumultuous opening, Lockington emphasized precision over momentum, and as a result the music’s phrases broke apart into fragments. Things improved tremendously from the midpoint of the first movement; Lockington’s patient control of the well-prepared orchestra paid off in the movement’s restrained second half, and then the Andante was full of stark beauty. Too bad Alexander Lipay’s lovely flute solo at the end was ruined by some idiot’s cell phone. Why do you people even bring those things into the hall? You’re not that important.
As if to prove that he could handle fast music after all, Lockington led the TSO through a more incisive reading of the two (connected) final movements. Perhaps this performance wasn’t quite all it could have been, but it readily demonstrated why the Vaughan Williams Fourth merits repeated hearings.
Alas, there was nothing to be done on behalf of Edward Elgar’s bloated, gaseous Violin Concerto, despite the best efforts of Lockington, the TSO and soloist Steven Moeckel, the orchestra’s concertmaster. Moeckel was impressive not just for his stamina through this 50-minute excrescence, but for his dark, woody tone on his lower strings, and for the silvery sound of his upper range. Just as Lockington did the utmost to animate the first movement’s introduction, Moeckel did everything he could to impose some shape on Elgar’s amorphous themes, but in the end you just can’t mold half-cooked porridge. Elgar was a marvelous miniaturist but he was lost in large-scale works (aside from his cello concerto); had he condensed each movement of this concerto to its five-minute essence he might have had something, but instead he spun everything out well beyond the point at which it lost its limited interest. And for a composer of so many decades of experience, it’s shocking how incompetent Elgar proved at balancing the violin against the orchestra in the tedious final movement, full of gouty pomp and pointless passagework. What a pity that Moeckel and the orchestra wasted their considerable talent on this unexportable English muddle.
English composers of a Romantic nature have been accused of writing too many vapid, pretty pastoralisms, musical depictions of cows gazing over a country fence. In the case of the Elgar Violin Concerto, we approach the cow from behind; after numbing us with a heavy methane fog, the cow lumbers away, leaving us with nothing but a steaming pile of crap.
