For those of us who complain about 20th-century music’s remoteness from the
general public, Aram Khachaturian offers a potent comeback, but some further
questions too.
The Armenian composer — born 100 years ago and dead for 25 — was
accessibility incarnate, and yet sensibilities high as well as low respond to
the folkloric gestures, the heart-on-sleeve sentiment, the bright colors and big
sounds of his music.
At what point, if any, does accessibility go too far? It is one thing to
beckon seductively, another to sit on the listener’s lap. At Carnegie Hall on
Friday night, with Constantine Orbelian conducting the Philharmonia of Russia,
the line-up of pieces wandered back and forth between the tactics.
"Ode in Memory of Vladimir Illyich Lenin" and the cantata "Ode of Joy" are
apparently new to this country, as they probably are to much of the world. It is
not hard to understand why.
The first, with its big baritonal string sound, is plain-spoken to a fault:
sincere in its enduring grief over a dead leader, smoothly melodic, but with a
seeming horror of any challenge to the broadest conventions of acceptable
harmony and movement. "Ode of Joy" is a brief political potboiler dependent on
histrionic gesture and loud noise. Marina Domashenko sang the mezzo-soprano
solos with appropriate vigor. The Yale Alumni Chorus and Yale Glee Club, looking
distinctly capitalistic in white tie and tails, bellowed on cue.
These of course are institutional pieces. They reflect the Soviet Union’s
deep hold on Khachaturian’s sensibilities and perhaps its bad effect on them as
well. By far the most interesting music was the earliest, the Piano Concerto
from 1936. Tonalities clash without grating. Rhythms outsmart the listener’s
expectations. There may be too much virtuoso razzmatazz, but Khachaturian takes
endearing pleasure in the excess.
Dora Serviarian-Kuhn, who has made a career of this piece, played as someone
intimate both with its delicacies and its bluster. Mr. Orbelian and his thick,
dark-sounding Russians did very well.
Elsewhere, Khachaturian’s distinct charm worked its way in and out of the
ballet music from
"Spartacus."
Synthesis is his great gift to music, with Armenian melody (sighing and sinuous)
and Armenian dancing (stately or wild) translated into vivid orchestral terms.
The overuse of deafening climax speaks of a composer grasping for the attention
of every listener within earshot. This is indeed music that needs — sometimes a
bit too much — to be loved.
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