Recalling an era of concerto as contest

In 1962, Leonard Bernstein recorded Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, known as the “Emperor,” with the revered classical-school pianist Rudolf Serkin as soloist. Two years later, a would-be assassin of President Nixon sent a bizarre tape to the conductor describing how he felt that Bernstein’s music making represented what is pure and good in this world. The little guy has to stand up for this, Samuel Byck, an unemployed salesman, said on his tape. One individual can make a difference.

The current film “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” a fanciful portrayal of this incident, has the would-be assassin drop the needle down on the slow movement of the “Emperor” as he begins speaking into his tape recorder. Throughout the film, the movement’s radiant hymn-like theme comes to represent misguided righteousness. Beethoven perversely buoys a twitching Sean Penn, who plays the here-named Samuel Bicke, in his botched attempt to hijack a plane and fly it into the White House.

I saw the film Sunday afternoon about an hour after I heard Mitsuko Uchida perform the “Emperor” with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to conclude her survey of the five Beethoven piano concertos with music director Esa-Pekka Salonen. Her playing was entrancing throughout the series, and no more so than in the quiet intensity and floating grace she brought to the ethereal “Emperor” Adagio.

As far as I know, no one in the grateful audience, which filled Walt Disney Concert Hall, was inspired by the Adagio’s eight or so minutes of purity and good to head over to LAX, shoot his way past security and try to get a plane to fly to Washington.

Yet the movie didn’t get things entirely wrong. The concerto genre attained its popularity in the 19th century because it became a potent symbol of the individual against society. In his insightful book “Concerto Conversations,” Berkeley musicologist Joseph Kerman, when discussing the “Emperor,” points to Tchaikovsky’s depiction of a concerto as an unequal struggle between “the powerful, inexhaustibly richly colored orchestra” and its “small, insignificant, but strong-minded adversary.”

That’s something that is all but lost in modern concerto performances, however, and those of the Beethoven piano concertos at Disney were no exception. Salonen and Uchida were hardly adversaries. They hugged warmly at the end and looked as if they meant it. What they gave us was an urbane, spirited and occasionally profound 21st century discussion. Ideas were thrown back and forth. But in the end, Salonen appeared to defer to his soloist, as most conductors do these days. Uchida was the hero from the start. It is the star soloist, not the orchestral institution, who now has all the power.

This held true even in the slow movement of the Fourth Concerto, where the orchestra ferociously barks out orders while the poetic piano proceeds dreamily unconcerned until the orchestra simply gives up. But no one barks at Uchida, and the Philharmonic seemed to know that instinctively. Instead, the players sounded as though they were feeding her her lines.

Indeed, the entire cycle was one of the orchestra trying to match Uchida’s authority, whether to phrase with her grace and subtlety or to sprint with her spirit and enthusiastic energy. Even the orchestra’s “inexhaustible” colors were not quite as vivid as hers. With each concerto, the orchestra came closer to matching her ideal. The Fourth and Fifth were splendid collaborations.

But I missed the nastier, more competitive side of the concerto business in these otherwise glorious performances. Some of that can be found in the Bernstein “Emperor” with Serkin. Salonen’s poised interpretation of the Adagio’s hymn tune offered a perfect launching pad for Uchida’s willowy flight. But Bernstein heaved heavily, and after so egotistical an opening, Serkin, an adamant classicist, had his work cut out for him.

If the conductor can’t but help show off his power, it is the soloist here who must stand up for purity and good and do something. Serkin asserts himself not through grace but through insistence. It must be like this, he seems to be saying in his playing, and Bernstein tones things down.

Hearing Uchida play Beethoven is a treat. And hearing her and an orchestra find common cause can make one feel for the moment that all is right in the world, that, if we decide to, we can work together for higher purposes.

But we shouldn’t forget the struggle. In much of the world today, individuals feel they have no voice. Beethoven wrote his radiant “Emperor” at a time when Vienna had been invaded by the French. Noise and misery assaulted daily life. The composer had to fight hard to achieve the inner, hopeful peace of the Adagio. But he did, and left us with a compelling example of an individual making a difference.