Principal Bassoon Daniel Matsukawa provides a rich, mellow tone that anchors the Philadelphia Orchestra’s woodwind section. Despite his essential contributions within the ensemble, though, he rarely gets his moment in the sun. The concerto repertoire abounds for clarinet, oboe and flute, but there are fewer opportunities for the bassoon to take center stage. That changed on 12th October with the premiere of Terra, a newly commissioned work by Brazilian-American composer Clarice Assad that places the steady sound of the bassoon amid an orchestration that harnesses the power of the elements. It showed the potential and the limitations of writing a full-scale piece for this instrument.
The orchestral accompaniment eclipsed the solo line across the work’s five interconnected movements. Assad assuredly blended a classic style with transgressive techniques, as when she had the string players breathe uniformly over the bodies of their instruments in the opening section, entitled Air. The force created a vortex-like quality that resembled a thunder sheet, the genuine article of which was heard later. The entire effect recalled the haunted quality in the initial bars of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin drew out spirited moments throughout that replicated the sounds of the natural world, as when sharp, staccato bass notes suspended themselves above string glissandi to create the sensation of raindrops splashing pooled water. When a piano thrummed in the distance of the third movement, percussion, woodwind and brass joined together and expertly mimicked the instrument. A slippery trumpet solo echoed out mournfully. The overall effect was characterful but disjointed.
Matsukawa’s elegance sometimes got lost in the shuffle. This has more to do with the relative simplicity of the part than what he brought to it. He introduced the work’s placid theme almost immediately, but the bassoon writing lacked largely in discernible variation throughout the rest of the 30-minute piece. Aside from some fast passagework in the second movement that approximated jazz improvisation, the bassoon seemed more teammate than captain. A few tutti passages overwhelmed Matsukawa’s filigree sound.
Perhaps Terra sounded tame because it came on the heels of Berio’s Four Original Versions of Luigi Boccherini’s The Night Retreat of Madrid. Here was Nézet-Séguin at his most impish, building the robust, colorful sound world from the spare snare drum that opens the composition to the full-voiced central section that invites the whole orchestra to join in the fun. I’d be happy if he began programming this witty work as often as its stylistic cousin, Ravel’s Bolero.
Two weeks ago, the season opened with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, the apotheosis of the composer’s relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra (and of his professional life). That recent hearing created a great context for his Symphony no. 1 in D minor. If the later work showed the influences of life in America on the composer’s style, this performance of the First was purely Russian, the result of a young man in the thrall of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. The Dies irae motif that followed Rachmaninov throughout his career sounded tense and agitated here, a literal and figurative ocean away from how it would manifest nearly 50 years later.
Rachmaninov tartly blamed the failure of the First’s premiere on conductor Alexander Glazunov, whom he famously said “feels nothing when he conducts”. No one would ever accuse Nézet-Séguin of such an impediment. Yet more than I’ve heard him in this work before, he charted a journey that was equally intellectual and emotional, with the brooding opening giving way to Romantic sweep in the Allegro animato, and brass chorales that sounded assertive rather than merely blaring in the finale. This was a thinking man’s Rachmaninov, but not at the expense of passion.
