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`All Rise' to jeer Marsalis mess at Tanglewood
By Keith Powers
Sunday, July 11, 2004 Where's a good machete when you need it? Wynton Marsalis' ``All Rise,'' which served as the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Tanglewood opener Friday evening in the Shed, is the longest, most overinflated piece of ``serious'' music to be presented in many a season.
``All Rise'' was a New York Philharmonic commission, first performed in 1999.
The work has been championed by Kurt Masur, who was on the podium Friday evening.
The premise feels good: a top-notch blues horn band, Marsalis' spiffy Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, surrounded by the BSO and backed by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and four gifted soloists. The concept feels good as well: 12 movements, based on 12-bar blues, an imaginative integration of musical cultures. It's the exact blend of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow that makes composers like Osvaldo Golijov so compelling and important to the future of``classical'' music. So what went wrong?
One thing: Someone forgot to remind Marsalis that less is always more. Marsalis stands apart from all other trumpet players for the brilliant purity of his tone, coupled with his clarity of interpretation and clever phrasing. His recordings, jazz and classical alike, are remarkable.
Which makes these proceedings all the more lamentable. ``All Rise'' has moments of brilliance, especially the choral writing, but for too much of the time individuals or individual sections are highlighted while most of the mighty musical forces onstage sit around and watch - for more than two and a half hours.
Highlights centered on the virtuosity and musicianship of the players and singers. Marsalis' band can flat-out play, and it was a pleasure to see the BSO musicians digging the chops of their jazz brethren. Our soloists were strangely underutilized. But John Oliver's marvelously prepared Tanglewood Festival Chorus was not, singing with soul all evening, and capping things off with a rollicking and swaying finale, ``I Am (Don't You Run From Me).''
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