While the search for a permanent music director continues, versatility has been in high demand at Seattle Symphony in recent seasons. Week after week, the musicians have had to adjust to the remarkably varied styles of a revolving door of guest conductors. But the latest visitor to the podium, the German conductor Christian Reif, brought the added challenge of a program calling for drastic shifts in style from one work to the next. The result was a rewarding performance filled with intriguing juxtapositions and enlivened by a heightened intensity of expression.
Reif, fresh from winning his first Grammy Award (for Walking in the Dark, an album featuring soprano Julia Bullock, his wife), is a former resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and pursues an active career in the US and Europe. For his Seattle Symphony debut, Reif exuded amiable confidence, technical refinement, and – above all – contagious pleasure in making music with the players.
The program began, rivetingly, with Julia Perry’s A Short Piece for Orchestra from 1952, which in the mid-60s became the first work by a Black woman to be performed by the New York Philharmonic. Though she died relatively young (in 1979), Perry left a prolific output that includes a dozen symphonies and several stage works, but her music has been shamefully neglected. A Short Piece dates from a period in her career when Perry was strongly influenced by European modernism – Luigi Dallapiccola became an important mentor – but reflects a unique sensibility and gift for concise, charged orchestral detail, which Reif shaped with admirable clarity.
The third of Mozart’s five canonical violin concertos, the only warhorse on the program, glowed with Apollonian freshness in the hands of soloist Randall Goosby, who also made his debut with the orchestra. He seemed to be feeling the music from inside, tracing every curve and appoggiatura of Mozartian melos with uncloying charm and genuine warmth. The tone he projected with his “ex-Strauss” Stradivarius from 1708 was small but unfailingly exquisite and wonderfully suited to the aura of muted strings in the Adagio, where Goosby’s radiant cantabile elicited applause at the end of the movement. Reif coaxed historically informed transparency of gesture and sensitive accompaniment from the reduced orchestra. As a counterpart to the Rondeau’s alternation of dance impulses, Goosby offered a spirited encore: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Louisiana Blues Strut: A Catwalk, which the violinist recently released as an outtake from his 2021 album Roots.
In a manner reminiscent of his mentor Michael Tilson Thomas, Reif gave a neat capsule summary of the strangeness of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony from 1945, that sardonic anti-climax to his trio of “war symphonies”. But what really bridged the gap with Mozart was the laser-focused precision of his performance. Reif illuminated the neo-classical transparency of Shostakovich’s orchestration and architecture in this slimmest of his 15 symphonies – one of the composer’s colleagues described the first movement’s mischievous main theme as “almost literally Mozart” – and at the same time foregrounded its jarring contrasts. With playing as searingly elegiac as Seth Krimsky’s anguished bassoon solos in the Largo, allotted generous scope by the conductor, you were never quite sure where to fit the puzzle pieces.
Moments of heartrending pathos surrounded by clownish, subversive humor are hallmarks of the Ninth. The swerve from an anticipated epic confrontation falsely promised by the brass to vulgar circus strains in the finale in particular came off with a Fellini-esqe glee as Reif dug into the irony of using neoclassical clarity in the service of unsettlingly mixed messages. All this is what made Shostakovich’s Ninth sound so enigma-riddled to its original audiences... but eerily relevant to our own ears.
A propos des étoiles Bachtrack