(emphasis added)

Robertson conducts all-Russian program

Saturday, July 22, 2000

By David Patrick Stearns

INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC

Sometimes a musician's greatest strength becomes a shot in the foot.

On Thursday, David Robertson conducted a program with the Philadelphia Orchestra that was as intelligently assembled, well-rehearsed and vigorously performed as one could hope for during the ensemble's hectic, here-today-gone-tomorrow season at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. But for all the sunniness of Robertson's stage presence (and the sense of well-being that comes with it), one looked in vain for a distinctive musical personality.

In an all-Russian program, Robertson positioned in the first half Prokofiev's comic, satiric side, represented by the effervescent Lieutenant Kije suite. Then in the second, one heard many of the same compositional gestures put to darker ends in the Alexander Nevsky cantata, drawn from Sergei Eisenstein's classic wartime propaganda film. In between was Borodin's orgiastic Polovtsian Dances, whose pageantry showed the soil from which Prokofiev grew. Besides being musically extroverted, the program was instructive.

Underneath all the rhythmic fizz and faux-military fanfares of Lieutenant Kije, one also heard lower layers of the orchestration moving into murkier, opposing tonal centers that reminded the listener that not all is comedy in this music. Such qualities are everywhere in the Nevsky music, along with occasional decorative moments reminding you that it came from the same mind as Kije.

Despite the obvious acoustical compromises that come with amplified, indoor/outdoor venues such as this, the sheer power of the sound left its mark again and again, particularly in the excellent Nevsky performance. Those odd, ominous harmonic intervals and instrumental pairings have rarely seemed so chilly and unsettling. I'm no expert in Russian enunciation, but I thought the well-prepared Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia convincingly projected the linguistic timbre of the language during the choral sections. And though mezzo-soprano Irina Mishura seemed to be in slightly uncertain voice, her full-bodied, authentically Russian sound was thrilling.

To his credit, Robertson disappeared into the music, calling attention to its many felicities without the self-regarding excesses. But like a great, versatile character actor, he lacks the star quality - at least at his youthful age, 42 - to make distinctive statements within such musical parameters. Nonetheless, he and other candidates for the orchestra's music directorship have pushed these summer concerts to a level of artistry one hopes for but doesn't often hear.