OVERNIGHT REVIEW: Esa-Pekka Salonen and Los Angeles Philharmonic premiere Shostakovich's "Orango"

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News
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Los Angeles Philharmonic; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor
Shostakovich: Prelude to Orango; Symphony No. 4 in C minor, Op. 43
Friday, December 2, 2011 • Walt Disney Concert Hall
Next concerts: Tonight at 8; tomorrow at 2 p.m.
Information: www.laphil.com
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The “sine qua non” of Ben & Jerry’s, the wildly popular ice cream company based in Waterbury, Vermont, is known as the “Vermonster.” A bucket contains 20 scoops of ice cream, a fudge brownie, four bananas, three cookies, four toppings, four ladles of hot fudge, whipped cream and marshmallows. Believe it or not, many people actually try to eat the whole thing! That’s what I felt I had done after last night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concert. At least 110 minutes of Shostakovich didn’t come with the “Vermonster’s” 14,000 calories and 500 grams of fat.

The impetus for this weekend’s gorge is the world premiere of the Prologue to Orango, which Shostakovich wrote in a few days midway between composing his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District in 1932. To get a detailed account of the story, click HERE. The short version is that the prologue was to have preceded three acts of this political-satire about a half-human, half-ape, but the only thing Shostakovich finished was a piano-vocal score of the prologue, and that lay undiscovered in the Glinka Museum in Moscow until it was discovered by Dr. Olga Digonskaya in 2004.

Irina Shostakovich, the composer’s widow (who was in the audience last night), commissioned British composer-writer Gerard McBurney to orchestrate the Prologue’s sketches. The L.A. Phil, Esa-Pekka Salonen — its former music director and now conductor laureate — and director Peter Sellars eagerly signed on to present the first performances this weekend.

McBurney actually had more to work with than just the piano-vocal score. Pressed for time, Shostakovich used the overture and the ending to his ballet The Bolt to open and close the Prologue and also included snippets from some of his other compositions. “That,” said McBurney in the preconcert lecture, “provided a template for the rest.” McBurney (who curates an ongoing series entitled “Beyond the Score” for the Chicago Symphony) explained that he immersed himself in every note that Shostakovich wrote during the 1930s time frame, especially Shostakovich’s 12 music-theater scores. “What I hope,” he said, “is that this is an approximation of what Shostakovich would have written.”

“Approximation” is a reasonable description. What McBurney delivered is a mostly loud, mostly furious account of what Shostakovich might have envisioned for his political satire (including what McBurney termed “an outrageous parody of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4”). What it lacked was the dark, sardonic wit that showed up later in the evening during the fourth symphony. Nevertheless, while it was only an approximation of Shostakovich, it was madcap — and marvelous — McBurney.

Last night’s production (for which Ben Zamora supplied atmospheric lighting) used 10 soloists (four of whom come from the 24 singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale). Sellars planted the soloists throughout Disney Hall (Jordan Bisch, whose booming basso was the first voice heard, began in the Orchestra East seats) and those involved both sang and acted their roles with power and exuberance (only one was overpowered by the gigantic orchestra. Ryan McKinny served as The Entertainer (envision Joel Grey in Cabaret) and did a fine job of playing to all four sides of the hall. Eugene Brancovenau was Orango, Michael Fabiano was the zoologist, and Yulia von Doren was Susanna.

Sellars, being Sellars, wasn’t content to let the music and performers stand on their own; the same thing happened with the premiere of El Nino, John Adams’ nativity opera. For Orango, Sellars leapt at the concept of political satire like a wolf devouring a lamb chop, projecting a dizzyingly rapid series of still images that juxtaposed “Occupy” protesters, B-1 bombers, foreclosure signs, U.S. military and Pentagon personnel, tract houses atomic bomb blasts, etc. — over and over and over again. If the idea was to get you eventually to mostly ignore the images and concentrate on the music, I suppose it was successful. Otherwise, I felt like I had undergone sensory overload at the end of the 45 minutes.

Ironically, the most affecting imagery came in the quietest moments: the black and white video images of a ballerina performing while the orchestra played a “Dance of Peace.” The Prologue’s ending seemed to arrive so suddenly as to leave the audience befuddled, but the applause for all concerned was almost as deafening as the music.

Salonen conducted the piece with slashing flair and the orchestra — which revels in Shostakovich’s music — played the Prologue superbly, treating it as if the piece was an old friend, rather than something they were performing for the first time.

This is one of those works that needs to be seen and heard several times to fully appreciate. In his program note, McBurney concluded by calling the Prologue “a ghost from a lost era, the work of a young composer of the utmost energy and brilliance, not yet cast down by history, ill-health, and politics. …” It’s also a premiere that might not have happened without the unique combination of McBurney, Salonen, Sellars and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and for that, we should all be grateful.

According to Sellars, it was Salonen who elected to pair Orango with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 4, and in many respects that decision made eminent sense. (To cite one example, both pieces are in the key of C — major for Orango, minor for the symphony.) However, the fourth is one of the thorniest of Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies, not least because of its construction: two movements of nearly half an hour each surrounding a 10-minute middle section. The composer also employed the largest orchestra for any of his symphonies: 20 woodwinds, 17 brass, two harps, celesta, double timpani, along with a plethora of percussion instruments and full strings.

Shostakovich was writing the symphony in 1935 when he fell afoul of the Soviet authorities over Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District and withdrew the symphony on the eve of its first performance in Leningrad. It would take 25 years for its first performance (on Dec. 30, 1961 by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra led by Kyrill Kondrashin). Although one of the work’s ardent early champions was Otto Klemperer, then LAPO music director, the symphony didn’t make it to Los Angeles until 1989 when André Previn conducted it.

Salonen conducted the piece last night with an insightful sense of its overall architecture, bringing out all of the brooding, sardonic nature was lacking in Orango. As it had during Orango, the orchestra played splendidly, tossing off the treacherous rhythmic sections of the first and last movements as if they were child’s play. Among the soloists, Principal Bassoonist Whitney Crocket stood out. At the conclusion, Salonen looked ecstatic and exhausted. Ditto for this listener.
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Hemidemisemiquavers:
• The preconcert lecture (with Digonskaya, McBurney, Sellars and Laurel E. Fay, author of Shostakovich: A Life and the Symphony No. 4 program note) was informative but — like Orango — delivered what was almost a surfeit of information. Sellars’ passion for the music in both pieces was riveting.
• A couple of items not in the program notes came out in the lecture. Dr. Digonskaya said that when she stumbled across the manuscript (which is 13 large sheets of paper crammed full of small notations), there were no identifying marks as to its composer. However, she knew Shostakovich’s handwriting and, by analyzing the paper and ink, knew that it was something from the 1930s. Thus began what she and McBurney termed a detective story worthy of Sherlock Holmes or an archaeological search.
• The Phil printed the text translations in the program in addition to the projected supertitles. Ask not why
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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.