Chamber Orchestra plays Berg

The winds in the Perelman:
A neglected Berg masterpiece, superbly revived

ROBERT ZALLER

The sparse audience that braved what I presume were the Arctic snows of a late September evening (or, in this reviewer’s case, the hazards of SEPTA) to hear the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia perform at Perelman Hall was well rewarded by a program as brilliantly executed as it was conceived. Conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn, having opened his season with an all-Weber program, essayed some rare and choice examples of the 20th-Century wind repertory for his second concert. The result, for the happy few on hand, was what is likely to be one of the most memorable evenings of the season.

I missed the concert’s opening selection, John Harbison’s Music for Eighteen Winds (1985). I left in good time to attend, but the six-foot high snow drifts that seem to paralyze SEPTA at all times of the year gave me only a few minutes through a closed door with Mr. Harbison. From what I could tell, the music was agreeable and well made, as his work usually is.

Stravinsky: Say no to sentiment

The rest of the program dated from the 1920s. Stravinsky’s Octet was, as always, a delight to hear. This is music that is totally engaging without attempting to be in the least degree profound; indeed, the rejection of Romantic profundity was the essence of Stravinsky’s project. This is not to say that he cannot be hugely impressive (The Symphony of Psalms) and deeply moving— the last pages of Persephone and Orpheus rank, for me, among the most ravishing moments of 20th-Century music. What Stravinsky avoids, like the plague, is sentiment.

His Octet, like his Petrushka, is street music— one hears the hurdy-gurdy in it, the Parisian boulevardier, and even, at the end, a hint of jazz, all filtered of course by a highly sophisticated sensibility that entertains at the highest level while keeping all its sense of fun. I wish only that the musicians had taken the front-row chairs abandoned by the Harbison players; it would have made them more visible, and less painfully mirrored the empty audience rows in front of them.

The program’s first half concluded with a genuine rarity, Vincent Persichetti’s 1929 work Serenade No. 1 for Ten Wind Instruments. Recalling that Persichetti was born in 1915, I had to check my program to confirm that this was indeed the music of a 14-year-old. Its five brief movements, less than eight minutes long in all, are witty, inventive, stylistically contemporary and fully accomplished in every regard— as extraordinary a debut, perhaps, as any American composer has ever made. Mozart, Mendelssohn and Korngold may have been equally or more advanced at a comparable age, but I can think of no one else. Persichetti was none of these, but he stayed never less than interesting for the nearly six decades of a highly productive career, and deserves more frequent hearing.

Pièce de résistance

The program’s pièce de résistance, however, was Alban Berg’s Concerto for Piano and Violin with Thirteen Wind Instruments (1923-25), one of the masterpieces of the Second Viennese School. Berg composed it in honor of Schoenberg’s 50th birthday (but, with his characteristic slowness and deliberation of composition, delivered the gift a year late), and he weaves his own musical initials into the score along with both Schoenberg’s and Anton Webern’s. There’s a nod too to the scoring of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, and, in general, to the large chamber music ensembles favored by mid-period Schoenberg.

Berg himself was a big orchestra man, and this homage is something of a sport among his own works. The sonorities, too, are often very Schoenbergian. But the fervid sensibility and dramatic intensity is Berg’s alone. Jeremy Denk was the exceptionally good pianist, but violinist Mark Steinberg, with his monkish black garb and anguished, Schiele-like features, was utterly remarkable in producing the gossamer textures Berg wrote for his instrument. Those acquainted with the Berg Violin Concerto will find much in this score that presages it, but, on its own terms, it’s wonderfully vibrant, ceaselessly inventive, and, like the best of serial music, a work whose formal complexity is fully subsumed by musical expressiveness.

The wind players all distinguished themselves as well, and my only quibble was, again, with the staging: Denk’s piano blocked out his accompanists, and his page-turner, for some reason, faced the audience instead of sitting to the piano’s left side. Music is meant to be heard— but seeing it performed, especially when the score is less than familiar, is not only a pleasure in itself but an important adjunct to hearing. This aside, Maestro Solzhenitsyn and his colleagues are to be congratulated on an adventurous and rewarding evening of music making.



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