The Fruits of an Endemic Tradition

When Internet radio finally catches on, when we can easily tune into high-quality broadcasts from anywhere in the world, Americans will have cause to be astonished. A number of the great national radio networks in Europe and Asia support major symphony orchestras (as NBC and CBS did in our own dim past). In addition, they support symphonic music as a living art form, persistently programming and commissioning important new work for broadcast.

The best known radio orchestra is the BBC Symphony in London, but there are many others, including those of Radio Netherlands and Radio France. In Germany, radio orchestras are an essential part of the musical landscape.

This week, the WDR Symphony of Cologne (WDR are the call letters for Westdeutscher Rundfunk, the nationally supported radio network of the former West Germany), began its first American tour in Southern California. Following concerts in Palm Desert (Tuesday), San Diego (Wednesday) and Palm Springs (Thursday), the orchestra travels the country for the rest of the month.

That the tour skipped Los Angeles (UCLA and the Music Center weren’t interested) and the Orange County Performing Arts Center (which didn’t have a free hall) is unfortunate. Civic Theatre in San Diego was not the best venue in which to hear the Cologne players. It is bone dry; the sound practically crackles as if blown across the stage by an acoustical Santa Ana wind. But the sound is at least true, clearly displaying this crisp band from its highest to lowest frequencies.

And the WDR Symphony happens to be a very crisp orchestra, as some record collectors might recall from its recordings (under the name Cologne Radio Symphony) of the nine Bruckner Symphonies conducted by Gunther Wand in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

The Russian conductor, Semyon Bychkov, now in his fifth season as music director of the WDR Symphony, has maintained the orchestra’s sharply etched sound. He has also continued its imaginative programming.

Wednesday’s concert began with “Feria,” a resplendent recent work by Magnus Lindberg that couldn’t have better celebrated the communal role of radio in European contemporary music. It was commissioned by the Finnish broadcasting system and premiered by the Finnish Radio Symphony at BBC-sponsored Proms in London in 1997, and, of course, broadcast live throughout Britain and in much of Europe.

Meant to evoke an outdoor Spanish festival, “Feria” is a great whirling exercise for large orchestra. The score, which lasted about 17 minutes in Bychkov’s performance (it was faster at its premiere), teams with life. Every instrument is an individual but easily falls in step with others. A snappy trumpet tune whirls throughout the beginning, picking up movement and momentum from its collisions with other instruments, almost like subatomic particles bouncing around in space banging into each other, forming new elements or setting off explosions of matter.

Mostly what comes from these collisions is something new, but not always. In the middle, the brass suddenly coalesces into a quote from a Monteverdi madrigal, a fleeting, ghostly image of the past, soon to be washed away by a watery Debussyan duet for piano and flute before the festivities erupt again throughout the whole orchestra. The overall effect is one of sustained brilliance, and that is just how it was played.

Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Major for two pianos offered a different kind of brilliance. It was written when the composer was 14 and already a dazzling talent. With Katia and Marielle Labeque as the lively soloists, the rarely heard concerto revealed a composer certainly far from fully formed but with enough technique to make his adolescent enthusiasm come irresistibly alive. It is music to make a listener of any age feel young. And the French sisters delighted in the opportunities for sparkling pianism, while the orchestra participated with light and agile accompaniment.

For Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which concluded the program, Bychkov continued the mood of celebration and youth. The orchestra was large, but the playing was fleet, full of color and finely textured, in the way a chamber performance might be.

Bychkov’s Beethoven was not so much a heroic barnstormer as a composer who, in every measure, had something surprising to show. It was, as was the evening, a show of dazzling music.