Curtis Orchestra: Modern and post-modern (1st review)

The Curtis Orchestra presented its midwinter concert at the Kimmel Center on Valentine's Day under conductor Juanjo Mena, with Jennifer Higdon's Pulitzer Prize-winning Violin Concerto bracketed by two works from the 1930s, one a concert rarity and the other a staple.

Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass, Op. 50— the last of Hindemith's works to bear an opus number— was composed on commission to commemorate the Boston Symphony's 50th anniversary in 1930, and what a bash that was! In addition to Hindemith, then still a 34-year-old enfant terrible not yet settled into his mellower middle period, conductor Serge Koussevitzky commissioned works from Igor Stravinsky, who produced his Symphony of Psalms, regarded by many as his masterwork; Howard Hanson (the Second Symphony, his most popular score); Albert Roussel (Third Symphony); and Sergei Prokofiev (Fourth Symphony).

The commissions went out before the stock market crash, but the works were all performed and paid for. We were a country back then.

Hindemith's Concert Music is far from the least of these works, and typical of his fondness for brash sonorities and unusual instrumental groupings. The brass and string choirs are set against each other, each producing its distinctive material and coloration, though increasingly blended as the work proceeds.

It begins with a great upward surge of a theme for unison strings, which the Curtis players dug into with gusto; and, after a tentative entrance by the tuba, the brasses more than held their own as well. This is a work as fresh, if not presumably as harsh as it was 80 years ago, and it does make one wonder why we hear so little Hindemith today, at least in the concert hall.

Curtis premiered his long-lost Piano Music with Orchestra (the early Hindemith favored the dullest titles he could think of for his music) a few years ago, but this thoroughly bracing and attractive work has since sunk back into its former oblivion. Some concert programmer (other than Curtis's) should get to work on this.

Primed for a Pulitzer

Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto was primed for its Pulitzer from the beginning— commissioned by the Curtis and three major orchestras and written for Higdon's former student, the splendid Hilary Hahn. I don't know what the competition was, but this 34-minute work is, on first hearing, a fine addition to the repertory.

Higdon's work is rooted in tonality and contains echoes of Barber, Copland and (yes) Hindemith—echoes, not snatches. From the opening bars, however— a figure played high on the bridge by Hahn, with delicate, Oriental-sounding touches in the percussion section— this is a score very much its own, finely constructed and balanced.

The substantial first movement features much give and take between the soloist and first violinist; the lyric second movement offers a lovely theme to the first cello before the solo violin gets to work; and the third, with its frenetic, almost non-stop work for the soloist, is a kind of hommage to the Barber concerto, whose passage-work was so dense that the violinist who originally commissioned it refused to play it.

Hahn made Higdon's challenges— no less formidable than Barber's and twice the length— look like child's play, and both composer and soloist received well-earned ovations.

Suppressed by Stalin

The Shostakovich Fifth Symphony concluded the program. Earlier this season, Charles Dutoit performed the composer's Fourth with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a work suppressed by Stalin before it could ever be performed and not heard for another quarter of a century. On hearing it for the first time, apart from in his head and in a two-piano reduction, Shostakovich ruefully remarked that it seemed to him a better work than many that had succeeded it.

That comment would seem to support the critical impression that Shostakovich's music suffered irreparably after he was forcibly turned from the modernist complexity and experimentation of his early work. In fact, this question is a complicated one. There was a conservative "turn" across the board in the music of the 1930s, affecting, among others, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith and even Schoenberg. Shostakovich anticipated this turn in his own Cello Sonata, Op. 40, composed before there was any real pressure on him to simplify his style.

Certainly, the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony is a very different work from the Fourth; the unanswerable question is what it might have been like had a stylistic evolution that might have taken place in any case not been forced on Shostakovich, quite literally at the risk of his life.

Russia's most terrible year

1937, the year he composed the Fifth, may have been the most terrible year in Russian history. Twelve million Soviet citizens were in prisons or concentration camps that year; many would never return. Shostakovich's patron, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was executed after having a confession beaten out of him which was spattered with his own blood— a spatter whose pattern indicates that his head was in motion as the blood was flying. Shostakovich himself kept a packed suitcase by his door in anticipation of a midnight arrest.

Under such circumstances, the wonder is that Shostakovich could write music of any sort, and the miracle is that he composed one of the masterpieces of the 20th Century, a work of tragic profundity that captured not only his personal agony but that of an entire people. The audience that first heard it in Leningrad in November 1937 responded with a demonstration that left no doubt that they understood the score as a requiem for themselves.

Yet such is the communicative power and universality of the Fifth that it has moved audiences far removed from the circumstances under which it was produced, including the one at the Kimmel Center that heard it on this Valentine's Day. It raised Shostakovich to an eminence in his country such as has perhaps never been enjoyed by another composer in history— not that it lifted him beyond further attack by Stalin and his henchmen, or even in the more "liberal" regimes that followed.

None-too-veiled reference

Maestro Mena took the opening Moderato at a brisk clip that sacrificed depth to propulsiveness, but the central Largo, the heart of the work, was expressively played, with the strings of the Curtis Orchestra producing a deep, rich tone not unworthy of Philadelphia's other resident orchestra, and plangent wind solos on the oboe and E-flat clarinet. The martial passages in the first and last movements were emphasized in a manner that brought out their brutality, and I sensed in Mena's handling of them a none-too veiled reference to the "war" theme of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony.

There are other ways to play the Fifth, but the Kimmel audience responded with enthusiasm, and Mena himself seemed delighted with the playing of his youthful musicians. Well he should have been, too, for they represent not only the future of Philadelphia but of much of the country, and they handled a challenging program with virtuosity and aplomb.♦


To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.