1812 Tchaikovsky Spectacular (San Diego Symphony, KPBS-TV, originally aired August 30, 2019; rebroadcast July 4, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
  

While most PBS stations (including ours in previous years) followed up the Capitol Fourth telecast with a repeat showing of the same program, this year KPBS chose instead to rerun a local show originally taped August 30, 2019 — and, let’s face it, rebroadcasts of concerts during the SARS-CoV-2 crisis actually make more sense than rerunning sporting events, since with a concert at least you know how it’s going to turn out and there’s no big suspense about the outcome. The show actually began with the San Diego Symphony’s current conductor, Rafael Payare, leading members of its brass section in a piece that was instantly familiar: the old traditional Shaker hymn “The Gift to Be Simple.” (Unfortunately for the Shakers, their idea of “simplicity” included a total ban on their members having sex — and, not surprisingly, their numbers dwindled over time.) The Symphony brass played this in an arrangement by J. Villanueva, but most American classical-music fans identify this with Aaron Copland because he used the song twice: as one of the 10 “Old American Songs” he arranged for voice and piano and a principal theme of his ballet Appalachian Spring. (The ballet is supposed to depict a Shaker wedding ceremony, but if your sect doesn’t allow you to have sex, what do you do on the wedding night?) The August 30, 2019 concert was devoted entirely to the music of Tchaikovsky, both familiar and not so familiar. It was conducted by Australian-born Christopher Dragon (I wondered if he was related to 1940’s arranger-conductor Carmen Dragon and his considerably better-known son, Daryl Dragon —who was “the Captain”in The Captain and Tenille, but he isn’t), who’s now the principal conductor of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra and came off during this concert as a screaming queen. (Well, that’s not entirely inappropriate since Tchaikovsky was Gay.) The first piece they played was the rather aggressive and sometimes ugly “Marche Slave” — Tchaikovsky was not a Russian nationalist, politically or musically, and when he tried to pose as one the results were generally not good. His main quarrel with the other leading Russian composers of his day, the so-called “Mighty Five,” was they wanted to root their music in Russian folk songs, traditions and legends and Tchaikovsky thought Russian musicians ought to look to the West for their models. 

The next work on the program was one I was unfamiliar with, though I’d heard its main theme before: “Souvenir d’un lieu cher,” Opus 42 (and his use of a French title was itself a spit-in-the-face to the Russian musical nationalists!). According to the Arkivmusic.com Web site, “This charming violin work owes its generation to the unique relationship between Tchaikovsky and his wealthy patroness, Nadezha von Meck. Effectively freeing the composer from any financial burden in life, this patronage carried with it the unusual ‘rider’ that the two parties were never to meet.” (One of the financial burdens Ms. von Meck freed Tchaikovsky from was all the hustlers who were blackmailing him.) Tchaikovsky wrote this work, whose French title means “Memory of a Dear Place” (the said place being von Meck’s villa in Brailovo, Ukraine, where Tchaikovsky was allowed to stay when von Meck wasn’t living there herself), around the time he was also working on his violin concerto, and apparently its first movement, “Méditation,” was originally intended as the slow movement of the violin concerto but was later replaced with the “Canzonetta” that’s there now. Also, Tchaikovsky only completed a version for violin and piano, and it was Alexander Glazunov who orchestrated it — but it’s still nice to know that, even though the movement structure is slow-fast-slow instead of the fast-slow-fast, we have what amounts to a second Tchaikovsky violin concerto and I wish more soloists and orchestras would pair the two together on CD instead of coupling the Tchaikovsky violin concerto with violin-and-orchestra works by other composers. The violin soloist was a young woman from the Utah Symphony named Ashlee Oliverson, and she was utterly glorious, fitting the mostly soft, elegiac mood of the music but being able to turn on the virtuosic juice when the score required it. 

Then conductor Dragon and the orchestra played the last movement from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 — apparently as a promotion for the complete Symphonies Nos. 4 and 6 the orchestra was supposed to play in their 2019-2020 season before SARS-CoV-2 pulled the plug on most concerts as well as big live events in general. Dragon’s interpretation was energetic and quite enjoyable, but I still think the best recording of this symphony is Leonard Bernstein’s 1970’s recording wth the New York Philharmonic, which I just re-acquired in a boxed set of Bernstein’s Tchaikovsky recordings with that orchestra (which includes all of Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies — and if you want a great recording of the Tchaikovsky symphonies at a reasonable price, look no further). The second half of the concert featured eight numbers from the Swan Lake ballet — I’m not sure what the provenance of the version Dragon programmed is but Tchaikovsky arranged a suite of six numbers from the score just before he died and gave it a separate opus number, 20a (the full ballet is 20). Neither Tchaikovsky’s own suite nor whatever it was Dragon programmed seem to make any attempt to follow the order of numbers in the complete ballet, much less tell a potted version of the ballet’s story, though of course Dragon opened with the so-called “Scène” that begins Act II (when the plot leaves the superficial high-life of the court of Prince Siegfried and enters the supernatural world of the titular swan lake, the evil sorcerer Rothbart who turns human women into swans, and Odette, his principal victim and the ballet’s star; though the principal ballerina in Swan Lake is obliged to dance a dual role, the good swan-woman Odette and the bad swan-woman Odile, who tries to seduce Siegfried from Odette) which was used over the opening credits of the early-1930’s classic horror films from Universal, Dracula and The Mummy. 

The concert’s finale, of course, was the 1812 Overture — actually heard complete, not just the flashy last four minutes we get at the Capitol Fourth concerts. The 1812 Overture was composed by Tchaikovsky in 1880 for a celebration of the 70^th anniversary of Russia’s defeat of Napoleon’s invading armies in 1812 — so one of the pieces trotted out at Fourth of July celebrations is about the successful defense by an autocracy against a foreign invader who brought at least some elements of democracy and enlightenment in its wake. (One historian commented that many of the countries Napoleon occupied kept some of his reforms in place even after his fall — whereas the countries the Nazis had occupied in World War II couldn’t wait to get rid of every vestige of Nazi rule. I think the case he was making was that Napoleon was a twisted idealist who actually did the countries he invaded some good, while Hitler was just a thug who plundered them and killed the people he considered “racially inferior.”) Christopher Dragon introduced the 1812 Overture by quoting Tchaikovsky as saying the piece was “loud and noisy,” which it is (though there is a hauntingly lyrical theme in the middle of it), though I suspect what Tchaikovsky was really saying was something like, “Yeah, it’s loud and noisy. I wrote it for a big outdoor celebration where they expected loud and noisy, so I gave it to them — but I really don’t like the piece and I’d just as soon never hear it played again.” (Actually, Tchaikovsky conducted it himself at least twice after the premiere — including at his famous concert opening Carnegie Hall in 1886 — so either he liked it after all or he grudgingly yielded to the work’s popularity the way Arthur Conan Doyle yielded to the popularity of Sherlock Holmes and brought him back to life after killing him off in “The Final Problem.”) 

The original outdoor performance of the 1812 Overture featured not only a symphony orchestra but an onstage brass band, a carillon and a battery of cannons — and after 1956, when Antál Doráti and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra recorded the 1812 Overture in a highly “produced” recording that added the U.S. Field Artillery and the bells of the Harkness Carillon Tower for the climax, the 1812 Overture has become a “sonic spectacular” both on records and live. And if the cannon and bells weren’t loud and noisy enough, Leopold Stokowski started the process of bringing in a chorus to sing the words of the national anthem of Tsarist Russia when Tchaikovsky quotes it in the score. Christopher Dragon’s performance was relatively low-keyed in the extra-noise department — a few cannon and a tubular-bells player — but it did accompany a fireworks display (so my husband Charles got to see televised fireworks after all after having got home from work too late to see the ones on A Capitol Fourth) and made a nice conclusion to a SARS-CoV-2-conditioned low-keyed Fourth of July!