Cinepinion - Jazz? At Avery FIsher? Is That Allowed?

Jazz? At Avery Fisher? Is That Allowed?
Music Review: The New York Philharmonic, December 9, 2006
by Henry Stewart

(Photograph from a different performance than the one described below)

Bramwell Tovey came out to the podium without his signature microphone in hand, and I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. I have seen Mr. Tovey conduct several times over the last few years while leading the New York Philharmonic's underappreciated Summertime Classics concert series. He, unlike just about every other conductor in the world, talks to the audience between pieces (imagine that!), providing insightful histories and noting the things to listen for, all with his sparkling wit and marvelous British inflection. You can’t help but feel affection for Mr. Tovey, as he really makes the audience feel as though they are his friends. And here he was, going into Aaron Copland’s El Salón Mexico without a peep, just a silent nod in our direction like he was Lorin Maazel or something! At least the performance was wonderful, rousing really, making me want to go out and start a war, or finish a war, or at least get drunk in Mexico.

Thankfully, when returning from backstage before Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 2, Mr. Tovey brought out a microphone surreptitiously concealed in the palm of his hand, as though the stage manager had forbidden him to use it but he was doing it anyway. But his mood was, unfortunately, a bit uncharacteristically dour, as though he didn’t really want to talk to us at all. I thought perhaps it was because he was discussing car crashes and untimely deaths (the work was written for the composer’s friend, the composer Stephen Albert), but his later addresses were pithy and only modestly chucklesome.

But after all, it isn’t like Mr. Tovey is my boyfriend, and we’re here to hear music anyway, right? Rouse’s symphony was a bit too modern-sounding for my tastes, though it did have some excellent timpani parts (the timpanist being the member of the orchestra the most fun to watch.) After intermission, we saw what we had all come here to see, a rather unbuttoned experiment for the awfully fusty Philharmonic featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra led by Winton Marsalis. The Philharmonic would perform a selection from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, and the jazzmen would respond with the related Duke Ellington arrangement of the same piece, a battle royale of sorts between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Yes, it was as much fun as it sounds!

Surprisingly, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra isn’t as stuffy as one might imagine it to be (I mean, just look at the name.) Don't let's forget that Mr. Marsalis is not only one of the finest trumpet players alive today, but one of the finest who ever lived. He and his band tore up Ellington’s arrangements like they were an ex-girlfriend’s phone number, cooking hotter than Ellington himself. It was refreshing to see some musicians behave uninhibitedly on the Avery Fisher stage. At one point, when the pianist mashed the keys for an explosive dissonant chord, I was worried someone would come out and take him away, saying, "that isn't what we do here, sir. That's a Steinway!" The jazzmen were all hootin’ and hollerin’ at one another (“yeah man!”) and the atmosphere was infectious; suddenly the audience, the squarest and whitest in New York, was hep – they applauded solos and offered a couple of “yeah!”s of their own. Of course, once you make an audience feel like it’s ok to applaud, they won’t stop – they’d applaud through the whole goddamn performance if they could, and they tried to during the encore! (It seems whenever Tovey is at the podium the Philharmonic gives you an encore.) Thankfully the insurrection soon died down; after all, this isn’t the high school Christmas concert.

The Philharmonic was unexpectedly and disappointingly a bit weak on the Tchaikovsky. If there’s one thing Tchaikovsky isn’t it’s subtle, but the performance often lacked the vitality and exuberance, the enthusiasm, that Pyotr Ilyich demands. Thankfully, they pulled themselves together with a brisk “Waltz of the Flowers”. (They better have, it’s one of my favorite pieces of music.) But the jazzmen were more than able to make up for any lack of ebullience, which they did with piece after piece. The whole affair had an air of immaturity to it, like a schoolyard dance-off, but if you view it as a contest I think the Jazz Orchestra came out on top.

Any perceived antagony between the two groups (in my imagination I fantasized each side hated the other with a bitter rabidity, something like, “who do these stuffed shirts think they are?” or “why, that bass player is on our stage in his shirtsleeves!”) was stifled by their behavior during the encore. While the jazzmen played some hot jazz, members of the Philharmonic began to chip in. The double bass player (it looked like David J. Grossman, but don't quote me) walked across the stage to where the jazz bassist was, took the bass, and started walking that doghouse like a pro. When the jazzman took his bass back, the Philharmonic bassist shooed the piano player away and showed he could pound the keys, too. Oh, aren’t they all so talented? When he took the bass for another go, before the piano player could sit back down Mr. Tovey jumped in unexpectedly and showed off his piano chops. Tovey's Chaplinesque manuevers prompted me to let out a rather embarrassing guffaw (I was on a date) -- for once, it seemed that the audience and the New York Philharmonic were actually having fun. Fun? At Avery Fisher? Is that allowed?

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