Itkin asks a question that will set the tone for my evening: "Who decides that orchestral music that has no text is decadent?"
Rather than receive Prokofiev's music as that of rebellion and toss him in the gulag, state officials heard this charging, confident piece and decided it was about them, and indeed used it in propaganda films behind images of workers on tractors, hailing the agricultural power of Russia. Prokofiev later said No. 5 was actually inspired by the spirit of the people, not the state; and the growing energy that builds through the piece represents, Itkin said, "people yearning to be free and the inevitability of that."
Fifty years later, what I know about classical music I didn't learn from the state, but from Hollywood. Many a younger audience knows the sounds emanating from an orchestra strictly as the score for movies and TV; we don't know how to listen to music without that imprint. We hear a rising tempo and we expect the movie's plot to climax; we associate a hushed, slow bass with the approaching villain; a quick run of the wood blocks or lingering tambourine accompanies a point of mystery in the show. Our language of orchestral music is informed by its application—we've been given a vocabulary by pop culture—not by our organic relationship to sound. In fact, certain sounds seem clichéd, banal—we've heard the sweeping violins so much we've typecast them as a joke ("Here's where they want us to be sad")—and we decreasingly respond to such manipulation. It's received as a form of entertainment propaganda. We're wired to conjure up the emotion to support a plot given to us on the screen: Here's the sound of a romantic comedy or here's the sound of a thriller or even, for me, tragi-comically, cartoons. I hear a quick playful conversation of violins and somewhere in my memory pops up Sylvester chasing Tweety Bird; I hear a falling note from a bassoon and Bugs Bunny has foiled Elmer Fudd. Is classical music ruined for me?
On this night, the inverse is true. Listening to classical music refreshes me.
The onstage behavior is so deferential to the music. The concert master and then the conductor govern the stoic behavior of the black-clad, no-name musicians, predictably set up with violins on the left, cellos on the right, percussionists in the back. Even the featured cellist, Matt Haimovitz, is not begging for your attention; he is delivering music. He plays this most sexual instrument with a sincerity popular culture is starving for—it is a beautiful and moving event: There are no desperate chicks humping each other by his side; there is no Jumbotron zooming in in search of his celebrity; there are no actors, no chiseled jaw of a movie star or the antics of an animated bunny. He sits there in his tux and delivers us all out of our bodies and onto the notes, each one taking us a step further away from our attention deficit disorders and our reliance on cultural propaganda. It's the music alone doing this work. What we have here, challenging our brand-name-fed minds and our freakishly notice-me! culture, is emotional authenticity.
I love the Philharmonic because by the time we get to Prokofiev's third movement, I have cleansed my head of at least some of the goo of pop culture, shed some of the propaganda of my generation and found some of my own thoughts and emotions. I am flying on the rhythms of Prokofiev's universal human spirit, feeling the yearning to be free and the inevitability of that.