“To serve their fellow men, to beautify human life and point the way to a radiant future. This is how I view the immutable code.” That is how Sergei Prokofiev described his approach to music in a passage published in the Soviet press in 1934 and reprinted in his carefully worded autobiography. Prokofiev was then in the process of being lured back from emigration to permanent residence in his home country, an evolution that involved both flattery and threats from the regime. In the minefield of Stalinist cultural politics, in which the wrong aesthetic could—and did—result in death, all creative artists had to be very careful.
Only shortly after Prokofiev penned those words, he scored his Concerto for Violin No. 2 in G Minor, one of the most exquisite uses of the string instrument in the classical repertoire. The concerto reflects the composer’s peripatetic life at the time. Still commuting back and forth to Europe, he wrote the first movement (“Allegro moderato”) in Paris, composed the first melody of the second (“Andante assai”) in the Soviet city of Voronezh, and completed the piece’s orchestration while visiting Baku, the capital of Soviet Azerbaijan. The premiere took place on yet another visit abroad, in Madrid (Prokofiev’s wife was Spanish), shortly followed by the composer’s ill-fated permanent move back to Moscow.
It would seem the work’s cosmopolitan dimension never entirely vanished. In this concert, a Dutch orchestra conducted by a Finn presented an all-Russian program featuring the Prokofiev concerto played by a Georgian violinist who lives in Germany. This was no ordinary effort. The orchestra was the Royal Concertgebouw, one of the top three or five ensembles in the world. The conductor was Klaus Mäkelä, a musical prodigy of irrepressible energy who, aged just 28, is finishing up early career assignments as music director of the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris and preparing to take over not only the Concertgebouw as chief conductor, but the Chicago Symphony as music director. The soloist was Lisa Batiashvili, arguably the world’s greatest performing violinist. And where did this starry international effort unfold? Even five years ago one might have reasonably, and even predictably, guessed New York City. The correct answer, however, is Palm Beach, Florida, where, even as the audience assembled for a refined evening of music, the battle for America’s future was being led only a few miles away at once and future U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. New Yorkers will hear the Concertgebouw later, after its Florida sojourn.
And what a treat they are in for. Batiashvili’s playing was ethereal and hypnotic. Prokofiev scored the violin part to open the concerto and dominate it thereafter with a melody taken—prudently, given the cultural proscriptions of his time—from a Russian folk song. Later on, we hear dance rhythms and, in a nod to Spain, castanets. The delicacy of Batiashvili’s technique reminds us that choreographers were inspired to adapt the second (“Andante assai”) movement for ballet.
Mäkelä introduced the program with a rousing performance of the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s second and final opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila. An epic quest tale from Russia’s past retold by the national poet Alexander Pushkin—who was meant to write the libretto but was felled in a duel before he could complete the task—the opera resounds with heroism. Mäkelä’s energetic and yet highly efficient mastery drew it out to perfection. He also did well with the second part of the program, an uncut performance of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 in E Minor. Rachmaninov’s first symphony had been a disaster at its premiere, and his second effort, though better received, still has a lugubrious quality that has caused later composers to make cuts. The composer’s piano concertos remain far more popular, but Mäkelä’s focus made a solid case for the symphony and earned a rousing ovation.
The Russian theme also appeared prominently in the Palm Beach Symphony’s season opening concert on November 10. The second half of the program was dedicated entirely to Mussorgsky’s somber Pictures at an Exhibition (1874), a musical depiction of a visit to an actual, but sadly posthumous, art exhibit of works by the Russian painter Viktor Hartmann, who died at the age of 39. Mussorgsky did not live a much longer life, expiring at 42, but his score was later orchestrated by Maurice Ravel in the version presented here. Under the baton of Palm Beach’s music director, Maestro Gerard Schwarz, the individual character of each painting in the musical depiction emerged with admirable subtlety and especially fine playing from the ensemble’s noble horns. A display of modern art from the collection of the University of Miami’s Lowe Art Museum, curated by its Beaux Arts director Jill Deupi, was projected between the orchestra and the proscenium. It featured some contemporary works that did not quite match the music, but others, like Mikhail Larionov’s 1916 costume design sketch of a cricket for the Ballets Russes’ ballet Natural Histories, fit the Russian motif.
The concert opened with an insightful interpretation of the modern American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Celebration for Orchestra (1984), a work of great versatility even if it does not exactly capture the glee of a celebration (Zwilich, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, tacitly admitted this and described the piece as “abstract.”) By far the highlight of the concert, however, was Schwarz’s elegantly conducted performance of Antonin Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor. The orchestra’s gentle undulations were beautifully accompanied by the soulful solo playing of Julian Schwarz, the conductor’s son, who deserves international notice.
Local talent in Palm Beach remains firmly in evidence and reaches a high standard. The artistic season truly opened earlier in November, with Ballet Palm Beach’s searing meditation on the Carmen story, originally a novella by the French writer Prosper Mérimée but best known from Georges Bizet’s sultry opera. Founding artistic and executive director Colleen Smith’s new adaptation, set to some of Bizet’s score and also incorporating music by the Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, avoids many of the more modern constructions and shows Carmen and the murderously passionate Don Jose in a more human light, bound by social mores. It is their shared passion that destroys them, not either character’s lustful will. At times, the simple sets make them look like they are in prison. The death theme haunts the work. Drawing on the card reading that predicts the volatile heroine’s death, Smith has introduced a ‘fate’ character who shadows the action in dance. Costumed all in black, Leah Frazeur was an evocative interpreter of death. Lily Loveland’s Carmen trod a delicate balance between passion and helplessness that one rarely sees in the character. Ihosvany Rodriguez’s Don Jose was by turns pathetic and enraged but still managed to compete for our sympathies.
The ballet program began with another Smith creation, a charming, balanced Mozart Intermezzo, danced by young company performers through a series of short balletic pieces to 18th century music. Gina Patterson’s Frac tur ed (spelled just so) continued in a more modern vein with parts for nine dancers (including Loveland and Rodriguez), with a series of couplings that ended on an inconclusive note.
Be that as it may, no one can avoid the conclusion that Palm Beach is firmly on the international cultural map.
