Review: Pablo Heras-Casado Conducts Houston Symphony and Lang Lang

Thursday night, the Houston Symphony and Lang Lang performed pieces Lindberg, Beethoven, and Schumann with Pablo Heras-Casado, presumptive contender for the music director post being vacated by Hans Graf. I have reviewed the young maestro before, and came away not nearly as impressed as one would think given the nimbus surrounding his name. But knowing that I can be overly cranky, I undertook to return afresh with an objective eye.

I think I did so. And while I found things to like and things that impressed me, there were profound defects in the precision and the performance that I can only attribute to the podium. Part of the problem (but only part) is Heras-Casado’s election not to use a baton.

After the jump, a detailed review.



Magnus Lindberg

EXPO by Magnus Lindberg

This was a wonderfully engaging piece and a great listen. About 10 minutes in length, the piece is composed in contrasting blocks of music that are juxtaposed and handed off between sections of the orchestra. The orchestration is brilliantly well done, and the musical gestures are reminiscent of composers you’ve heard before, but without being derivative.

This was the most consistently enjoyable portion of the concert. Because of the way that the music is constructed, different sections in the orchestra alternately take the lead and are exhibited to grand effect with music that is idiomatically suited for each section’s strengths. In this performance, the brass choir played with especially good blend, sonority and power. The tutti horn fanfares near the end of the piece were terrific, broad and powerful without even a hint of excess.  Likewise the woodwind choir colorfully tossed off gestures the reminded me of Debussy’s “La Mer.”

The piece, however, revealed one inherent weakness that consistently plagues Heras-Casado and indeed plagued the rest of the concert.

EXPO starts with an incisive “crack” in the percussion followed by rapid passage work in the strings. That block of passage work returns several times in the piece. Based upon what I was observing, I don’t think Lindberg intended it to be nearly as random and rhythmically misaligned as it was.

Without meaning to be harsh, every time it returned, it really was not together at all. Heras-Casado seemed powerless to make it start together or to correct the machine once it was in motion. In fact, because he conducts without a baton, it seemed to me that his efforts at correction made matters worse and distorted the ensemble’s ability to discern his intent at beat and subdivision. In my view, the remainder of the concert confirms this hypothesis.

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 2

Although second numerically, this concerto is actually Beethoven’s earliest effort at the form. Beethoven is already using his own voice, yet the compositional language would have been very recognizable to Mozart.

Because of the Mozartian style, there is nowhere to hide either a lack of rhythmical precision or a lack of musical ideas. During the first movement, Heras-Casado showed a tasteful grasp of the musical content, communicated some very pleasing ideas, brought out inner voices and countermelodies in a very adroit and pleasing manner.

But, the same lack of rhythm that plagued the string passage work in EXPO was on display from the very opening of the concerto, where the strings must play:

During the silence after the first note or the downbeat of the second bar, the subdivsion cannot falter or the note following the silence will be late and the next passage arhythmical.

They were. Consistently late and misaligned. And the imprecision of Heras-Casado's empty hand rendered it impossible to correct.

This is not a unique occurrence. Recall that this is exactly the same problem I identified in the Beethoven First Piano Concerto Heras-Casado conducted in his prior visit. But this time, there were no tympani and trumpets in the orchestration to lay down a pulse for the rest of the orchestra to follow.

Nor was it here alone that the orchestra was struggling to find an ictus in the blur of Heras-Casado’s empty hands. The opening of the second movement of the concerto was overly slow and lacked the underlying feel of smaller beats, which alone can give rubato some melodic direction. This lack of internal time obscured the time signature, disoriented the listener, and caused the melodic line to fall flat. I literally could not tell the location of the downbeats or identify the time signature for the first four bars.

Rubato, good. Disorientation, not good.

Finally, the third movement should be most like the Beethoven we know in this symphonies. The charm comes from misplacing the emphasis within the bar, putting the emPHAsis on the wrong syllAHbull if you will. The solo piano introduces the idea with figures lie this. Note the sforzandi on the second and fourth eight notes in the bar:

 Heras-Casado, to his credit, seemed to want more sforzandi than he was getting, but the orchestra, especially the string section, was just not giving it to him. This could be the struggle of following him, the lack of a stick, or simply fatigue and self-preservation.

Schumann Symphony No. 4

The final piece on the concert included some brilliant moments by individual players and sections and a rollicking scherzo in the middle. Notable standouts were the brass section, including great horn playing and a clarion climax at the highest point of the piece by principal trumpet Mark Hughes. Similarly, Concertmaster, Frank Huang, played elegant solo passages, only to be overbalanced and somewhat drowned out by his colleagues.

But this piece also served to confirm for me that there was an insufficient connection between the podium and the performers.

The first movement of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony begins with a broad and weighty downbeat into a slow introduction which transitions through an accelerando into the main tempo (lebhaft = lively). The orchestra had no consensus of when the first note should start, and so some started early. Then, when the time came to accelerate, the tempo change did not happen at the same pace across the orchestra. When lebhaft was finally reached, it was nicht zu lebhaft.

I do not attribute it to the orchestra, but to the conductor. The same problem occurred over again when intermediate climaxes or cadences were reached in the movement. The music would grind too much to a halt, and then would fail to fire on all cylinders getting going again.

Likewise, Schumann’s slow movement and the trio section to his scherzo had the same problem as the slow movement of the concerto. Both were limp. Melodic lines neither moved horizontally nor lined up vertically with the place in time.

Conclusion

Part of me truly wishes that Heras-Casado was “the guy.” From a marketing perspective he’s a coup. He is surrounded by buzz and is conducting everywhere. And  he seems like a nice enough fellow, sitting for example in amongst the orchstra to enjoy Lang Lang's encore. If he lived up to the hype, our Houston Symphony could ride along with a rising star.

But I am more convinced than ever that he is not “the guy.” Conducting is obviously not all about beating time, but if nothing else, a conductor should get an orchestra to play together. Heras-Casado did not. And while there is obvious talent there, I think Heras-Casado should not learn base-level precision on the job with our orchestra, and may not learn it at all until he picks up a baton.

Stick-free conducting might not be such a liability for a choir or an early music ensemble, but it is quite clearly a liability here. Sure, one can point to exceptions. Valery Gergiev conducts without a baton. But even Gergiev is inconsistent in his results as compared with Muti or Abbado or Haitink. And not to put too fine a point on it, Heras-Casado is not Gergiev or Boulez or Masur.

Not yet, anyway. Maybe some day he will be. I hope he is.

But there is a reason that nearly every great conductor the world over uses a baton, and it is not just tradition.

They use a baton because it works.