Cover image: Olari Elts, conductor (Photo: Marco Borggreve)
Perennially popular, Rachmaninov ‘s music outlasts fads and styles, attracting audiences in droves whenever it is programmed. Seattle Symphony has just given us a rich helping of it, two weeks ago and now, with a symphony and piano concerto the first weekend and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini plus the Symphonic Dances this past weekend.
For each program the conductor has been from the Baltic region: Denmark’s Thomas Dausgaard at the end of March, Estonia’s Olari Elts this time. Alexander Melnikov played the First Piano Concerto in March, Stephen Hough played the Rhapsody—really another piano concerto under another name—this weekend.
It’s been striking to see how views of how Rachmaninov’s music should be performed have changed, even fairly recently. Performances have always tended to be been marvelously lush, romantic, larger than life, opulent, and of course virtuoso demonstrations for the pianist. All this is still there, but there seems to be more restraint on the opulence and lushness side.
Performances sound crisper, with a bit less of the extremes. Hough’s performance felt light and clean-edged, sometimes dreamy, with nuance even in the midst of the Rhapsody’s virtuosic demands. The results were supremely satisfactory to the audience, which responded with tumultuous applause. Hough responded with an encore of Solovyev-Sedoi’s The Moscow Nights, a Soviet song arranged by Hough himself.
Every conductor uses different movements to direct the orchestra, and it can sometimes be hard to tell by watching from the audience just what the conductor is indicating, but the 45-year-old Elts’ conducting can be flamboyant at the same time as being meticulously precise. Using the ‘playpen’ podium—although he never seemed in danger of stepping off—he at times directed like a windmill or a fencer, yet one could see his fingers alone creating very specific tiny indications to particular players. The result in Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances had intensity and color, decisiveness and vigor, allied with the same sensitivity which pervaded the Rhapsody, plus fine work from the alto saxophone in the first movement.
The concert opened with a work receiving its U.S premiere, De Profundis (2013) by the prolific Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur. ‘De profundis‘ is the opening Latin phrase of Psalm 130, a prayer of supplication and request for eventual redemption. Tuur’s 17-minute work is in one movement, and overall it reminded me of John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, in that it seemed to portray a vast canvas.
It had an atmospheric sense from the start with vibraphone and harp, but moved into stormy music with high violins and no vibrato plus noisy percussion sounding like wild winds, crash bangs from drums, plus a growling orchestra. This tumult then moved into the quiet aftermath, and it could be listened to as a musical allegory for the supplication and the anguish of the psalm, with the hope of forgiveness and peace after in the still quietness of the end. It is a piece to be heard many times in order to gather in all the myriad details, and it left a strong wish to hear more from this composer. Elts is clearly a conductor who understands and can convey Tuur’s music.