Conductor Antonio Pappano had a dulling affect on the Philadelphia Orchestra last night (Thursday). The program is familiar territory to the ensemble - Glinka, Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3, Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2. Pappano not only added little in the way of interpretive thought or stylistic philosophy, he also managed to strip the Rachmaninoff of a lot of its tension. My colleague David Stearns will have a review in Saturday's paper, and maybe he liked it more than I did. My guess though is that Pappano is off the unofficial list of candidates for the job of music director here. You can judge for yourself tonight.
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Antonio Pappano: (Tepid) Coals to Newcastle
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Peter Dobrin has been writing about classical music and the arts for The Inquirer since 1989. He earned an undergraduate degree in performance from the University of Miami, and received a master's degree in music criticism from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University.
He’s grateful for news tips, willing to engage in a certain amount of back and forth with readers, but is unfortunately unable to remove old LPs from your basement or post photographs of your cat.
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Comments (2)
Thursday must have been an off night -- I just came back from Saturday night's performance and it was superb. The Orchestra's sound, especially the strings, was a lot like Dohnanyi's Cleveland Orchestra. But most importantly, Pappano seemed to know how to get the Orchestra to play their best. As much as I like James Conlon's appearances with the Orchestra, the level of playing this week was clearly far superior to Conlon's program last week. I'd put Pappano at the top of the list of potential MD's along with Ivan Fischer.
Posted by Seth | December 15, 2007 10:49 PM
Posted on December 15, 2007 22:49
When I attended Levine's performance of the Berg Concerto and Mahler 9th at Boston's Symphony Hall last month, the BSO violinist I spoke to afterwards told me she felt that Saturday night performance was the best of the three they had done. I asked her if that was usually the case, and she said, "Generally, yes. Thursdays are the worst because we're tired."
I assume what is true for the BSO is also true for the Fab Phils, that the Saturday night/Sunday afternoon performances are the best technically and interpretively. So it may be that reviewing the first performance of a weekend series may not be the best way to analyze and orchestra and its conductor. But, newspapers are newspapers and you have to get the word out ASAP.
Posted by Don Drewecki | December 17, 2007 1:08 PM
Posted on December 17, 2007 13:08