Chamber Orchestra: Mahler and Schoenberg (2nd review)

Forgettable Schoenberg, memorable Mahler

ROBERT ZALLER

Belgian guest conductor-composer Dirk Brosse brought an unusual program to the Chamber Orchestra’s penultimate program of the season. It began with Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite in G for Strings. That’s right— G major, and not a work of youth but from Schoenberg’s 60th year, 1934. This was around the time when the once and future enfant terrible of dodecaphony was declaring that there was “still plenty of good music to be written in C major.” Perhaps so, but not by Schoenberg, and not in G major, either.

Although he was still to write fine work in the 12-tone idiom, conventional tonality had become a closed book, at least to Schoenberg. None of the late-life scores he composed in a tonal idiom is anything more than a curiosity, and the Suite in G is, simply, 31 minutes of the most uninteresting music ever written by a major composer. Themes arise and are passed around; a little fughetta comes up; a few squeaky tremolos remind one of a badly scored Hitchcock movie; and so on.

(Schoenberg was already living in Hollywood by this time, and he actually did write a work called Music for a Film Scene that year as well, so perhaps he was trying to audition for a job. Erich Korngold had nothing to worry about, though.)

Schoenberg’s fascination with the Baroque

But if the Suite in G is a colossal bore, and a weird one as well—Schoenberg’s idea of tonality was to dip Baroque textures into some kind of glutinous materia medica— its context bears remarking. For many decades, Schoenberg and his acolytes jousted with Igor Stravinsky (who had no school, but influenced everything being written except by the serialists) for pre-eminence in the musical avant-garde. As is well known, Stravinsky finally capitulated and began writing 12-tone music in the 1950s, although not until Schoenberg was dead. Twenty years earlier, however, it was Schoenberg who seemed to be throwing in the towel and joining Stravinsky’s neo-classical bandwagon, for the Suite in G (among other works such as the Concerto for String Quartet and String Orchestra, and the Cello Concerto after Monn) is self-consciously written in the Baroque style. Why was this so?

It may be pointed out on Schoenberg’s behalf that his fascination with the Baroque was of long standing, and that esoteric Baroque devices had found their way into his most rigorously serialist scores. But it is also a fact that Schoenberg was living in Hollywood, where Stravinsky was a neighbor (the two men keeping to their respective turfs as fastidiously as any leaders of the Bloods and the Crips), and that serialism was about as welcome in America as socialism.

Schoenberg had a living to make— he was turned down once for a Guggenheim— and tonal music, in the increasingly conservative climate of the 1930s, was the way to make it. Stravinsky had already brilliantly recapitalized his art via Tchaikovsky and Pergolesi (much as Picasso did through Ingres), and it would have been an act of heroic forbearance for Schoenberg not to fish in these waters.

Of course, he had already proclaimed serialism to be the music of the future, so the way back to the past was rather more difficult for him. The real problem for Schoenberg, though, was that, unlike Stravinsky, he didn’t have anything to say in the idiom of another day.

Dirk Brosse, who conducted the Schoenberg Suite with every appearance of reveling in its charms, obviously sees virtues in it to which I am oblivious. The orchestra responded dutifully. We must leave the matter there.

Mahler’s exquisite refinement

The program’s second half, in which Schoenberg had a hand as well, was quite another matter: a chamber reduction of Gustav Mahler’s glorious Das Lied von der Erde.

Shostakovich once remarked that if he had an hour of life left (perhaps an unusual thought experiment, unless you lived in Stalin’s Russia), he would like to spend it listening to Das Lied von der Erde. Quite a compliment, but not excessive. Whether you regard this six-movement work as a symphony manqué or an extended song cycle, it’s a work of exquisite refinement, in which Mahler recapitulates many of the themes of his career and bids us the first of his extended leave-takings in its half-hour long finale.

Mahler scored Das Lied with a lighter hand than was his wont, perhaps one reason why he withheld the designation of “symphony” from it. Schoenberg, often given to tinkering with others’ work (as was Mahler himself), made a chamber reduction of the first movement in 1921, and planned to give the rest of the work the same treatment. He never did so, but in 1983 the German composer Rainer Riehn finished the job, employing the identical forces of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, piano, harmonium, string quartet and percussion ensemble.

Burden on the soloists

Obviously, such an ensemble cannot produce the richness of Mahler’s orchestra, but its intimacy gives individual instruments (many doubling parts) great opportunity for expression, and conveys in the very spareness of its textures a poignancy that, while differing from the original, is nonetheless in its spirit. This demands very good playing, of course, and places a great deal as well on the shoulders of the vocal soloists. Fortunately, all performers were up to the challenge. Mezzo-soprano Mary Ann McCormick and tenor Jason Collins both sang richly and powerfully, with Mr. Collins adding some histrionics to Li-Po’s drinking song that, while distracting, did no harm to his music.

It seems almost unfair to single out individuals in ensemble work so splendid, but concertmaster Gloria Justen’s violin, alternately ethereal and impassioned, encapsulated an entire Mahler string section in a single singing tone, while flautist Edward Schultz and oboist Geoffrey Deemer (who initially refused his bow) did heartbreakingly beautiful work. Bravo, though, to everyone, including Maestro Brosse.

As to the scoring itself, Schoenberg overused the piano, while the Riehn movements were happily lighter on the pedal. This chamber version of Das Lied is no substitute for the glories of the original, nor was it meant to be. But it is more, too, than simply an opportunity for a small orchestra to play a work intended for full symphony. Like a new frame around an Old Master, it brought out fresh and striking accents in a familiar work. One is grateful to have heard it, especially in a performance of such commitment and love.



To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.