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Chamber Orchestra plays the Moderns
Robert Zaller
No wonder Berg and Bartok can still sound new
ROBERT ZALLER
One of the advantages of a chamber orchestra is its ability to showcase different choirs. Music director Ignat Solzhenitsyn did just that this past weekend in a program that featured brass in the first half and strings in the second.
The works for brass both had a liturgical cast. Murray Gross’s Watchman, Tell us of the Night (1992) takes its title from a hymn tune also used in Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony. The Ives work, composed nearly 80 years earlier, is far more radical sonically, but Gross’s work is more than agreeable, though the late entry of two of the its three trumpets (called for in the score) is—unlike similar gestures in Mahler— more distracting than dramatic. Like the Corsican composer Henri Tomasi’s four-movement Fanfares liturgiques (1947), which followed, it is jazz-inflected.
Tomasi’s score, which also used tympani, was the more ambitious; the third movement is entitled “Apocalypse,” and the affirmative finale (“Good Friday Procession”) rises to a considerable climax. Unfortunately, the louder the Tomasi got, the more it sounded like movie music, and, at that, more like something for Samson and Delilah than the Passion. Still, sacred or not, the music was fun, and very well played, with principal trumpet Rodney Mack taking well-deserved bows in both pieces.
A brief but exquisite solo
The program’s second half was devoted to much more familiar works by two of the 20th Century’s three great Bs, Bela Bartok and Alban Berg. (My third B would be Benjamin Britten, of course, with apologies to Leonard Bernstein and Ernest Bloch.) Berg’s 1928 Lyric Suite for strings is an adaptation for string orchestra of three movements from a larger, six-movement work for string quartet. Unlike many such arrangements, the orchestral version gains in richness without seeming padded. Two works don’t make even a mini-festival, but it has been good to hear some Berg this season, the Chamber Orchestra’s other offering being the Chamber Concerto heard last fall.
Again, the performers were excellent, and the way concertmaster Gloria Justen’s brief but exquisite solo in the third movement faded into the body of the other strings was breathtaking. The ensemble was particularly effective in the second movement, whose sharp accents and pizzicati remind us that Bartok’s Fourth Quartet was being composed at the same time.
The Ormandy problem remains
Can one call a work 80 years old modern? In Philadelphia, certainly; but there is more to the question than the cultural conservatism that arrived with Eugene Ormandy in 1936 and has never quite left town. The century after Beethoven was that of the Romantic hero, consummated in Wagner and parodied (but never quite overcome) in Richard Strauss. It was really Mahler who changed the tone, introducing us to what, for want of a better term, one might call the neurotic subject. In Mahler’s later symphonies particularly, the more or less straightforward Romantic quest narrative is fragmented into a multitude of micro-events that reflected the splintering of modern consciousness.
Berg’s music, particularly his operas, pursues psychological complexity and sexual ambivalence in the manner of Mahler, if not on his grandiose scale. (The critic T. W. Adorno saw a “latent opera” in Berg’s Lyric Suite; and, as with the Chamber Concerto, it is full of thematic and numerological clues of an autobiographical nature.) Bourgeois audiences, willing to follow the more straightforward Romantic hero, were baffled, and often repelled, by the neurotic subject. In many cases, they have not yet caught up today, even though the cultural moment Berg and others represented has long passed.
The postwar problem
What happened? Conservatism returned in the form of neoclassicism— Stravinsky famously averred that his music had nothing to do with emotion— and, after World War II, psychological complexity was replaced for the new avant-garde by mathematical sophistication. It is now recognized that much of the music this movement produced, like the ghastly architecture of the postwar years, contained little aesthetic value, however imposing its formal structures. The radical simplifications of minimalism followed, and the new tonalism of the neo-Romantics succeeded that. These gestures exhausted, music fell back on the anything-goes eclecticism of the present day.
No wonder Berg can still sound new.
The program concluded with Bartok’s Divertimento for Strings, another classic of the interwar years, though in the simplified mode of Bartok’s later years. One wonders where he might have gone in the postwar period had he been granted, like his contemporary Stravinsky, another 25 years of life. Maestro Solzhenitsyn conducted briskly and effectively.
ROBERT ZALLER
One of the advantages of a chamber orchestra is its ability to showcase different choirs. Music director Ignat Solzhenitsyn did just that this past weekend in a program that featured brass in the first half and strings in the second.
The works for brass both had a liturgical cast. Murray Gross’s Watchman, Tell us of the Night (1992) takes its title from a hymn tune also used in Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony. The Ives work, composed nearly 80 years earlier, is far more radical sonically, but Gross’s work is more than agreeable, though the late entry of two of the its three trumpets (called for in the score) is—unlike similar gestures in Mahler— more distracting than dramatic. Like the Corsican composer Henri Tomasi’s four-movement Fanfares liturgiques (1947), which followed, it is jazz-inflected.
Tomasi’s score, which also used tympani, was the more ambitious; the third movement is entitled “Apocalypse,” and the affirmative finale (“Good Friday Procession”) rises to a considerable climax. Unfortunately, the louder the Tomasi got, the more it sounded like movie music, and, at that, more like something for Samson and Delilah than the Passion. Still, sacred or not, the music was fun, and very well played, with principal trumpet Rodney Mack taking well-deserved bows in both pieces.
A brief but exquisite solo
The program’s second half was devoted to much more familiar works by two of the 20th Century’s three great Bs, Bela Bartok and Alban Berg. (My third B would be Benjamin Britten, of course, with apologies to Leonard Bernstein and Ernest Bloch.) Berg’s 1928 Lyric Suite for strings is an adaptation for string orchestra of three movements from a larger, six-movement work for string quartet. Unlike many such arrangements, the orchestral version gains in richness without seeming padded. Two works don’t make even a mini-festival, but it has been good to hear some Berg this season, the Chamber Orchestra’s other offering being the Chamber Concerto heard last fall.
Again, the performers were excellent, and the way concertmaster Gloria Justen’s brief but exquisite solo in the third movement faded into the body of the other strings was breathtaking. The ensemble was particularly effective in the second movement, whose sharp accents and pizzicati remind us that Bartok’s Fourth Quartet was being composed at the same time.
The Ormandy problem remains
Can one call a work 80 years old modern? In Philadelphia, certainly; but there is more to the question than the cultural conservatism that arrived with Eugene Ormandy in 1936 and has never quite left town. The century after Beethoven was that of the Romantic hero, consummated in Wagner and parodied (but never quite overcome) in Richard Strauss. It was really Mahler who changed the tone, introducing us to what, for want of a better term, one might call the neurotic subject. In Mahler’s later symphonies particularly, the more or less straightforward Romantic quest narrative is fragmented into a multitude of micro-events that reflected the splintering of modern consciousness.
Berg’s music, particularly his operas, pursues psychological complexity and sexual ambivalence in the manner of Mahler, if not on his grandiose scale. (The critic T. W. Adorno saw a “latent opera” in Berg’s Lyric Suite; and, as with the Chamber Concerto, it is full of thematic and numerological clues of an autobiographical nature.) Bourgeois audiences, willing to follow the more straightforward Romantic hero, were baffled, and often repelled, by the neurotic subject. In many cases, they have not yet caught up today, even though the cultural moment Berg and others represented has long passed.
The postwar problem
What happened? Conservatism returned in the form of neoclassicism— Stravinsky famously averred that his music had nothing to do with emotion— and, after World War II, psychological complexity was replaced for the new avant-garde by mathematical sophistication. It is now recognized that much of the music this movement produced, like the ghastly architecture of the postwar years, contained little aesthetic value, however imposing its formal structures. The radical simplifications of minimalism followed, and the new tonalism of the neo-Romantics succeeded that. These gestures exhausted, music fell back on the anything-goes eclecticism of the present day.
No wonder Berg can still sound new.
The program concluded with Bartok’s Divertimento for Strings, another classic of the interwar years, though in the simplified mode of Bartok’s later years. One wonders where he might have gone in the postwar period had he been granted, like his contemporary Stravinsky, another 25 years of life. Maestro Solzhenitsyn conducted briskly and effectively.
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