MSO, cellist Johannes Moser, conductor Paul Daniel
The intensity and presence of Johannes Moser’s playing exactly fit Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 Friday evening, as Moser made his Milwaukee Symphony debut.
Cellist Johannes Moser
Moser and guest conductor Paul Daniel were of one mind from the start. The opening movement forged ahead with a firm, brisk, relentless tread. They built a thrilling and terrible momentum that rolled over all the varied material in its path.
In the second movement, luxuriously harmonized melancholy in the massed strings stood in sharp contrast to the Moser’s wan and desolate solo, played softly and without vibrato. It sounded like the private lament of a shell-shocked survivor of disaster; a reprise of that lament, played all in harmonics, suggested that the survivor, too, was fading away.
The cadenza of this concerto, a separate movement played solo, reworks the lament ever so gradually from defeated, halting muttering to an outcry of epic anger. Moser was patient with the former and furious with the latter. He stood tall over the virtuoso challenge of the piece and brought the music to its full stature as an epic, dramatic soliloquy. It set the stage for the bitter, headlong, antic madness of the finale.
He was on top of the concerto and Carl Nielsen’s sprawling, complicated Symphony No. 4 (The Inextinguishable), in four connected movements with material in common. This is a monumental sort of symphony, with lots of brawny bass lines combining cellos, basses, timpani and low brasses. Daniel churned it up, and the bass-cleffers turned it up, to hair-raising effect.
The woodwinds got to be the little blooms among the redwoods, with an intermezzo that sounded ready to float away like dandelion fluff. Daniel shaped phrases gently yet fully and released the music’s irresistible charm into Uihlein Hall.
Daniel opened with James MacMillan’s Sinfonietta, a piece so heavy-handed in its moral sentiments that you half expect the composer to come out with a ruler and start rapping people on the knuckles. Its groaning and morose material (we’re saaaad, because…) contrasts with a grotesque and shrieking march (…militarism is baaaad).
Before that, the guest conductor felt compelled to explain the program, found that he couldn’t, really, but did spend quite a while suggesting that while composers often dislike others applying words to their music, he was going to apply just a few anyway, and then couldn’t think of any good ones.
If you don’t have anything to say, it’s better to say nothing.
Special kudos to Krystof Pipal, whose flawless, expressive horn solos added a great deal to the cello concerto.
This program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday (Jan. 15). Click the link for details and tickets.
Johannes Moser will give a master class at 10:30 a.m. to noon Saturday, in room 320 of the Music Building at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The public is invited to observe. Admission is free.
To read an interview with Moser, click here.
I’m sorry that I could not attend last night’s performance but I did make it to Moser’s gig at Blu Thursday. When the elevator doors opened on the Pfister’s 23rd floor I was surprised and delighted to find the place packed. There was even a registration table which I thought might offer some kind of an MSO subscription package.
Au contraire! It appeared that the programming gods were feeling mischievous and scheduled Moser to perform on the same evening that Lisa Blythe and her singles menagerie, Lisa’s List, had descended on Blu for a night of small talk and business card swapping.
In the minute or two that it took to make sense of this scene I found myself with a red paper bracelet making me eligible for drink discounts and wondering how this crowd of schmoozers would respond to the unusual performance they were about to witness.
Alas this strange bit of cultural kismet did not end happily. A small core of MSO musicians and devotees were understandably unhappy to be surrounded by a mob of chattering troglodytes who appeared to have no appreciation of the sublime if occasionally atonal sounds they were witnessing.
I hope this unfortunate disaster does not rule out future appearances by MSO musicians in nontraditional settings. The MSO Monday series at Alterra is a delight and such cultural nibbles are win-win-win for the arts groups, the host businesses and the public. But they do require more foresight than the Pfister demonstrated this week.
If Skylight Opera is invited to perform at The Chili Cookoff at the Harley museum later this month co-sponsored by Lisa and her list, I suggest they politely decline.
Thanks for commenting, Ted. I wanted to go to this, but some personal stuff got in the way. The Marcus Hotel people are really committed to cementing their business to the arts in Milwaukee. I think all parties will eventually figure it out. — T.
Apart from the somewhat longwinded spoken intro, the Shostakovich and the Nielsen really crackled. Moser’s an absolute firecracking pistol and was wedded last night to conductor Daniel whose clear, sharp–if a bit dramatic–leadership propelled the program. No wonder conductors like the MSO–they played the bejesus out of all of it! Bravo to all!