A cornucopia of "œnew" classical music

Beyond Beethoven's Fifth:
A cornucopia of "new" classical music

TOM PURDOM

One of the great secrets of the classical music concert circuit is the number of novelties its devotees encounter as they make their rounds. Contrary to the opinion held by the disadvantaged souls who’ve never visited our Eden, we classicists don’t spend our evenings listening to Beethoven’s Fifth over and over again, night after night.

“How many times have you heard a trio for flute, viola, and bass this week?” flutist Mimi Stillman asked when she introduced Erwin Schulhoff’s Concertino for Flute, Viola, and Double Bass at the latest concert in her Dulce Suono series at Penn. Most of us, of course, didn’t even know a trio for that combination existed.

Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) was a Jewish composer who died in the Nazi death camps. Stillman teamed his Concertino with works by Handel and the Elizabethan master John Dowland, and it more than held its own in that illustrious company. It reminded me, in fact, of my all time favorite among trios that utilize innovative combinations: Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp. Schulhoff exploited his unusual tone colors with the same creativity Debussy applied to his inspired teaming. The Concertino is an irresistible mix of driving rhythms, touches of jazz, and passages in which Stillman could switch to the brighter sound of the piccolo. If Schulhoff were a better-known composer, his trio would probably be one of the staples of the chamber repertoire.

A musical survivor of the Dresden bombing

Three days after the Dulce Suono concert, our youngest period instrument organization, the Tempesta di Mare Baroque Orchestra, presented the “modern premiere” of several works by an 18th-Century composer named Johann Friedrich Fasch. Herr Fasch’s manuscripts survived the bombing of Dresden during World War II, but they were water damaged when percussion from nearby bombs cracked the underground vault that was supposed to protect them. The directors of Tempesta di Mare, Richard Stone and Gwyn Roberts, have been restoring Fasch’s manuscripts for the last two years, using computer enhancement techniques to resurrect important details like faded staff lines.

Fasch became a renowned composer during the High Baroque— the era of Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel— but his work has an interestingly modern sound. Bach was primarily a synthesist who brought the styles of the Baroque to their peak. Fasch was an individualist who foreshadowed the future. His orchestration is the trait that leaps out at first hearing. Fasch blended different timbres of winds and strings and passed the center of action among the different instruments with a flair that suggests Stravinsky, rather than Bach.

He could do this because he was the court composer for a generous patron who provided him with unusually large resources for the period, with a full complement of woodwinds, brasses, strings and timpani. His music is an ideal project for Tempesta di Mare, which has assembled a 21-piece orchestra by recruiting period instrument specialists who live outside the Philadelphia region.

The early music repertoire— music written roughly between 1400 and 1750— is permanently embalmed in libraries and manuscript collections, but we are only beginning to explore the thousands of scores created during those centuries. Some works, such as Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, have become standards. Most are still waiting for the moment when some musician will scan a score with a performer’s eye and decide it’s worth programming.

Orchestra 2001 outlasts its century

Orchestra 2001 is a more obvious source of novelties. It was organized in 1988 to play the music of the 20th Century. Now that it has actually managed to outlast its original area of interest, it has expanded its scope to include the 21st century. This year it is spotlighting the works of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who is probably best known, among the general public, for the music used in Stanley Kubrick’s film, Eyes Wide Shut. The Ligeti pieces scheduled for every Orchestra 2001 concert this season were originally supposed to survey the work of a living composer. Ligeti’s death in late 2006 transformed the series into a retrospective.

Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for wind quintet is based on an unpromising premise. In the early 1950s, Ligeti wrote an 11-movement experimental piano piece. The sonic landscape of the first movement was limited to one pitch, until the very end, when a second pitch joined the festivities. Movement Two regaled listeners with two pitches, with a third added at the end, and this process continued through the eleven movements. The bagatelles are arrangements of six of these pieces, with the first bagatelle limited to four pitches and the rest using six, eight, nine, ten, and eleven.

Pitch is, of course, only one element in music. Ligeti may have limited his pitching staff but he made up for it by the way he applied his creative powers to rhythm, tempo, harmony and tone color. To me, wind quintets tend to have a passionless, metallic sound. Ligeti found tone colors no one else seems to have noticed. Bagatelle Number Two, for example, begins with a dreamy oboe playing over a single chord repeated by the other instruments. The instruments take turns playing the lead, and the timbre of the chord changes, along with the color and mood of the melody, as each instrument leaves the main group and the last soloist returns to it. The other movements create effects such as dark melodies played over a shrieking cacophony, or a driving chattering punctuated with flights of melody.

If you like loud music….

Not all novelties are totally successful. The Curtis Orchestra premiered a new organ concerto by Eric Sessler at its second concert of the season, and for me the concertos virtues were all packed into the third movement.

The first movement was titled Electric Dreams and was supposed to generate the excitement of rock music. It satisfied my appetite for loud music but, like rock music, that was about all it did. The second movement was based on a vision of childhood dreams, but much of it sounded too much like the organ music that sometimes precedes weddings and funerals.

The third movement, interestingly, was the only section without a title that invited mental pictures. The composer titled it Momentum after he wrote it, as a straightforward description of its musical nature. It was just as loud as the first movement but combined all that massive organ volume with changes of pace, storms of responses from the strings and timpani, and displays of skill, such as a passage in which the organist dropped his hands and demonstrated his prowess with the foot pedals. It was a perfect lead-in for the bright, lively Pines of Rome that brought the afternoon to an exhilarating close.

And that’s not all….

I picked these four pieces because they happened to inspire writable thoughts. I could have discussed the Romeo and Juliet music by American composer David Diamond that the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia played recently; the piano trio by American composer Melissa Wagner that three Philadelphia Orchestra musicians played for the postlude after a Thursday concert; Piffaro’s exploration of Mexican Baroque music at its latest outing, or the moving quartet by cellist Lloyd Smith that 1807 and Friends sandwiched between classics by Haydn and Ravel.

Even when something looks relatively familiar, it may be more of a collector’s item than it seems. When the Philadelphia Orchestra played Bruch’s appealing Scottish Fantasy early in February, with David Kim doing his usual stylish work as the violin soloist, the program notes stated that the “most recent” Orchestra performance had taken place almost exactly 15 years ago, in March 1992. I don’t believe I heard it that time, so there’s a good chance this was the first time I had ever heard the Philadelphia Orchestra perform one of the most charming items in the repertoire.