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“Survivor, Princeton”
Wide emotional scope
Sunday, October 22, 2006
By Paul Mack Somers
Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Mark Laycock (conductor), Vladimir Ovchinnikov (piano). R. Strauss: Don Juan, op. 20; Dohnányi: Variations on a Nursery Song, op. 25; Brahms: Symphony no. 4 in E minor, op. 98. Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall, Princeton.
While the opening Don Juan and closing Brahms’ Fourth were certainly the pieces that most audience members would have pegged as the main works of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra’s season opener — and perhaps they really were — the piece that captured the attention was Ernö Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Song.
Dohnányi was certainly not attuned to today’s sensibilities in which it is a cultural sin to “spoil” a review or even casual discussion of a book or movie by revealing main plot points, especially the ending. He gives away one of the greatest musical jokes in music literature by telling us in the title that the subject of next half hour will be a nursery song. If only he had called it something like Variations on a Folk Song, or better yet “Mozart” Variations since good old Amadeus had done his own set on the same nursery theme. Maybe Mama Variations for the tune’s French name “A vous derai-je mama.” Too bad it couldn’t have used English and called it Starlight Variations.
The piece for large orchestra (including two timpanists!) and piano begins with a lengthy and portentous orchestral introduction. It builds in intensity piling up sequences, dramatic phrases, volume, harmonic tension, and finally arrives at a big *dominant seventh chord that absolutely demands the piano to enter next, and to do it with a crash of Lisztian thunder.
Well, it comes in alright, but in this piece pianist Vladimir Ovchinnikov put out his two forefingers stiffly as chopsticks as if about to begin (what else?) “Chopsticks” (hey, where do you think that chestnut got its name?), and played Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. The audience roared, as the composer intended. The joke nowadays is even bigger because of the prominence of “Twinkle” as the first piece Suzuki violin students play, and one would have to guess that the number of Suzuki parents past and present was pretty high in the audience. Just when they thought they had shaken the dratted tune from its insidious imprint in their brains, here it came again in an adult concert!
The piece is filled with wit more subtle than the beginning, with nostalgia in the presence of some lovingly decadent Viennese waltzes, and pianistic virtuosity befitting a composer who composed one of the adlut piano exercise books still deemed irreplaceable (This writer knows a major artist who plays Dohnányi’s Essential Finger Exercises every day).
Every pianistic demand was met with flawless technique, leaving the audience much impressed. But so was every extra-musical suggestion in place: after an extensive orchestra *tutti there came a pause. Ovchinnikov with an eyebrows-raised look at conductor Laycock, pointed to himself as if to say, “Now me?” and then lit into the piano with more pianistic fireworks.
The audience loved it, supplying an instant standing ovation as Ovchinnikov used the final chord to propel him to his feet and face the audience. They responded so long that he gave a solo encore, playing the “March” from Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges — you remember, the signature tune for The FBI in Peace and War.
Brahms’ most erudite symphony, his Fourth, was vividly imagined by Laycock and brought to life so dramatically that all its erudition was mere underpinning. That’s as it should be. Without the emotional content the final *chaconne is only a composer’s parlor trick and the opening theme of the symphony nothing but a mundane series of descending *thirds with a clever octave displacement every fourth note.
The piece could have used more rehearsal time to pull a few tentative entrances together. Or perhaps the tentativeness was because the players were flat-out tired, for this was a very arduous concert for them, and one has to imagine that their concentration could flag, to say nothing of the inevitable physical toll it took to actually play all those notes. Indeed one player muttered to no one in particular in getting off stage and down to the green room, “That was ‘Survivor, Princeton’!” Other musicians laughed knowingly.
Just to put it into perspective, a violinist once told me that the second violin part to Richard Strauss’s Don Juan is more difficult than the solo part of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. And that was the concert opener!
Laycock’s Don Juan was filled with *rubato, which the orchestra followed with precision. Woodwind colors were given great prominence, which allowed the listener to perceive Strauss’s *contrapuntal and orchestrational skills far more than usual. All the wind soloists deserved their bows at the conclusion, and none more than the four members of the horn section who defined musical “gusto” by letting fly with the *unison statement of one of the most famous horn licks in the literature. It was a highpoint!