Leon Botstein plays conductor with the Jerusalem SO in Chicago
I'll have more to say here soon on Leon Botstein (above -- Bard College photograph by Steve Pike) and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. For now, here is my Thursday, November 13, 2008 suntimes.com review of their November 11 concert in Chicago.
Conductor Botstein proves he knows the score, but little more
Whatever else one thinks of the educator, writer, and orchestra conductor Leon Botstein, there can be no disagreement that he is tireless.
A University of Chicago alum, he became president of a small college in 1970 at age 23 and had taken the same job with Bard College up the Hudson River from New York City in 1975 at 29. Building that school up since then, complete with celebrity faculty members and starchitect-designed buildings, meant the polymath Botstein didn't have a chance to pull all the pieces together for his Ph.D. thesis in history (from Harvard) until 1985.
Since then, Botstein has launched the well-respected and interdisciplinary Bard Music Festival -- Sergei Prokofiev was the subject this year; its 20th edition next summer will focus on Richard Wagner -- and taken the helm of not one but two financially struggling orchestras: the American Symphony in Manhattan in 1992 and the Jerusalem Symphony in 2003. He pulled off these feats with a combination of fund-raising savvy and an educator's sense of building thematic programs that, on paper at least, are unusual and often enlightening.
There's only one problem here. Botstein is not a conductor.
Yes, he stands in front of his orchestras and leads them through rehearsals. Yes, he was an amateur violinist. Yes, as a college president he hired teachers to drill him on baton technique.
But the results one has heard over the years. and in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra's Chicago debut at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park on Tuesday night, are no different from what one would hear from any other tireless person from any other field who had the financial backers to keep him on a podium for years going through the moves of being an artist.
All three composers on Tuesday's program, one of two the Jerusalem Symphony is playing on a 16-city U.S. tour, were Jews who at one point or another wrote for Hollywood. Refugees Ernst Toch and Miklós Rózsa (above) had successful careers scoring films that left them with little time for their concert compositions. The output of Aaron Copland, a son of European immigrants, was in reverse proportions.
Although the Vienna-born Toch (left, at far right, in a remarkable 1937 photo in Santa Monica with Otto Klemperer, Prinz Hubertus zu Loewenstein, and Arnold Schoenberg) won a 1956 Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony, he remains best known for his 1930/1950 spoken-word-game Geographical Fugue. The program-opening Big Ben Variation Fantasy of 1934 is a work of purely biographical interest, if that, and was played listlessly.
The evening's hero was the remarkable American fiddler Robert McDuffie in Rózsa's Violin Concerto, written for Heifetz in 1953-54. A specialist in obscure works himself, McDuffie plays with magnetic energy and seeming effortlessness, making a strong case for this Romantic-tinged, perpetual-motion work. Unusually for him, McDuffie lost his way at two different points and, as he was carrying the performance, this caused some uncomfortable musical moments.
One day, Chicago will hear a top-flight performance of Copland's famed 1944-46 Third Symphony complete with its extensive development of the composer's Fanfare for the Common Man. I have heard more poor performances of this piece than I'd care to remember, but never one so leaden and deadly as Tuesday's. With the conductor's head buried in the score, his arms offering wayward cues and workmanlike tempos, one wondered if it was worth giving these musicians employment for such indifferent musicmaking.
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