Review: The ASO, violinist Gil Shaham enthrall a small but enthusiastic crowd

Across the country, performing arts groups report sluggish ticket sales since reopening after pandemic lockdowns. For the audience, it’s understandable: a sketchy mix of local outbreaks, new work-from-home routines, restaurant inflation and all the other uncertainties that make public entertainment a questionable activity in our not-yet post-Covid lives.  

Week after week, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts appear to be struggling with the same complex problems. Even the buzz of our nationally acclaimed music director, when she’s on the podium, doesn’t generate the expected box office. There’s no magical fix.

So on Thursday in Symphony Hall, a rainy evening with a lesser-known Finnish conductor, Hannu Lintu, leading the band and without a top-10 hit on the program, it came as no surprise to see large blocks of empty seats.

What was encouraging was all the clapping between the concerto movements.

Violinist Gil Shaham, an amiable classical star for almost 30 years, was soloist for Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto. It’s music in the sweeping, late Romantic tradition, a style that had been largely swept away by the time of the concerto’s premiere in 1945.

Korngold had one of the more remarkable (and creatively tragic) careers in 20th-century music. A child prodigy, praised by Mahler, Strauss and Puccini as a youth, he wrote sensational ballets and operas and, by his early 20s, had what’s still his most substantial work, Die tote Stadt, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera. Soon Hollywood called, and he answered. His plush, emotions-on-sleeve style became the definition of “cinematic.” When you thrill to one of John Williams’ outer-space or dinosaur soundtracks, give a little thanks to Korngold.

But after the second world war, his music and his attitude couldn’t incorporate the influence and edges of modernism. He continued to write music for the wrong century and died a neglected (but not forgotten) composer. 

Shaham, with his lush, buttery tone and warm interpretation — and also never comfortable with musical modernism — made the ideal soloist. He cut perhaps the definitive recording of the work three decades ago, and this week’s program booklet reminded us that he actually brought the concerto to the ASO for the first time, in 1999, under Yoel Levi.

Thursday, Shaham didn’t so much play to the listeners as share his love for this melodic gem with us. After all these years, he’s kept it fresh, and his joyous enthusiasm and sense of collaboration with the orchestra was immediately apparent. There’s a tranquility to his virtuosity, too. His violin playing isn’t as seemingly effortless and athletic as it once was, but he delivered a beautifully comprehensive reading.

Korngold knew how to write for an audience. The opening movement, typical of many Romantic concertos, ends with a flourish and a bang that signifies an ending — called a cadence in musical jargon. You hear a bold closing gesture and you want to cheer. That was the reaction by a great many people in Thursday’s crowd. Shaham and Lintu smiled right back, happily accepting this sincere praise.

And there was more applause after the gorgeous second movement (which doesn’t end with a cadence) and of course also after the high-spirited romp of the finale, where the composer borrowed from his old film scores, with the sounds of Westerns and high-seas adventures in the mix. Playing to the audience’s id, the whomping loud flourish at the very end triggered euphoria. 

Yet century-old concert-hall etiquette dictates that the audience remain quiet between movements of a concerto or symphony. Near my seat on the main floor, an older gentleman sighed and then huffed at these intrusions. To applaud at the wrong places means you’re not a regular concert-goer. After a similar concert faux pas, an anonymous internet commentator going by the sobriquet Musicology Duck pointed out, “if you don’t want people to clap between movements don’t write cadences” — a twisted logic that lays blame on the composers. 

At the ASO, applause between movements suggests that they “papered” the hall, giving away tons of free tickets to students or other groups who might enjoy the show but don’t typically attend classical concerts. It’s both smart and generous: If an organization can’t earn the income at the box office, they might as well fill empty seats and give paying customers (and the musicians on stage) a fuller sense of community. An alive audience, reacting to the music as they hear it, enhances everyone’s experience, right?

The clapping filled the spaces, too, in Jennifer Higdon’s Concerto for Orchestra, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2002. The ASO helped build Higdon’s career — commissioning her, recording her music, winning Grammy Awards for it. And they’ve kept her big works in the repertoire. The orchestra knows her style and sound as well as they know any living composer.

As the name implies, the Concerto for Orchestra, in five contrasting sections and modeled after Bartók and Lutoslawski’s masterpieces of the same title, puts each section of the ensemble in a starring role. The opening movement is wild, perhaps overwritten. The textures are often so thick you can’t hear what’s going on across the stage. At several points, you see the extreme effort from the woodwinds — their faces flush red and desperate to take a breath — but you can’t hear them beneath the boisterous percussion and the full weight of the strings.

This opening is intense, or maybe a little uptight, a big piece trying to say a lot in a hurry. Conductor Hannu Lintu seemed more the traffic cop than interpreter, where keeping everyone together counted as success. 

In the inner sections this piece really soars, often brilliantly. The second movement opens with plucked strings, a nifty sound that builds in layers and hooks the listener. The third includes long solos for many of the section principles, highlighted by flutist Christina Smith, her tone at turns purring warm or focused and biting — just right. But as the players take their turns, often with lovely phrasing — oboe, clarinet, double bass, second violin, cello, viola, etc. — it starts to feel more pro forma than musically organic. The composer went down the checklist of orchestra personnel. Everybody gets a turn.  

The fourth movement is the stand-apart highlight. Scored for a truckload of percussion (and backed with harp, nice touch), it seems to cover most every soundworld possible, from the expected to the unlikely and the compellingly weird, often with eerie or emotional impact.

While the Korngold and Higdon might not have been music of conductor Lintu’s choosing, he opened the concert with music of Finland’s great composer Jean Sibelius, a rare chance to hear his tone poem The Oceanides, a work inspired by Greek mythology and polished while on a 1914 sea voyage across the Atlantic. (This was apparently the ASO premiere of the work.) Lintu brought out all of Sibelius’ signature moves, but his reading lacked urgency, maybe a point of view. 

The program repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.

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Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.