Curtis Orchestra plays Bernstein and Prokofiev

The 1940s may be regarded as the last great decade of the symphony. The four major post-Mahlerian practitioners of the form— Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev and Shostakovich— were still alive and (except for Sibelius) active. Shostakovich produced three of his symphonies in that decade, Vaughan Williams two, and Prokofiev two.

Stravinsky returned to the purely instrumental symphony for the first time since his student days with his Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements. Hindemith wrote two symphonies; Martinu wrote five and Honneger four. In the U.S., Copland wrote his Third Symphony, still considered the great American symphony, while Piston, Harris and Hanson made impressive contributions to the form. And Leonard Bernstein wrote his first two symphonies.

The Curtis Orchestra, in its midwinter concert at the Kimmel Center, programmed two of these symphonies, the Prokofiev Fifth and Bernstein's Second, the latter better known by its subtitle, The Age of Anxiety.

Which great city?

These were preceded by a vigorous curtain raiser, Richard Danielpour's Toward the Splendid City. That would not, of course, refer to Philadelphia, where Danielpour is now a Curtis faculty member; it was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and first performed there under Leonard Slatkin. It's no intended slight to say that it sounds much like a leftover piece of Bernstein, with jazzy rhythms and infectious energy, and student conductor Vinay Parameswaran matched its high spirits with his own.

Miguel Harth-Bedoya took over the podium for the Bernstein. The Age of Anxiety is a curious bird, but by the late 1940s the term "symphony" had become somewhat elastic. The work is a response to W. H. Auden's long poem of the name, but in purely instrumental terms, as none of its verses are set.

The prominent piano part, very nimbly and idiomatically performed by Leon McCawley, may be said to take the place of a voice, and Bernstein himself indicated that it "spoke" for himself against the interjections and animadversions of the orchestra. Like much of Bernstein's "serious" writing, it deals with a spiritual quest, although the Hopperesque setting (three men and a woman in a late-night bar) is more the composer's Fach than the lugubrious quarrel with God he would attempt a decade and a half later in his Third Symphony.

The piece, in two parts and six episodes performed without a break, has an improvisatory feel, although it is formally constructed and even introduces a tone row at one point. Bernstein had moved on from his Curtis days by the time he wrote it— Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony would give it its premiere— but it's a score in the Institute's blood, and from the haunting opening duet for two clarinets to the climactic finale, the Orchestra performed it with relish and zest.

Problematic Prokofiev

Prokofiev certainly belongs among the symphonic Big Four after Mahler, but his output in the form is the most problematic. The First Symphony, with its insouciant brevity and its classically scaled orchestra, was a witty putdown of Mahler's longueurs: almost an anti-symphony in terms of the late Romantic tradition.

The Second, written in Prokofiev's Modernist heyday in Paris, is aggressively dissonant, and the composer later repudiated it for its deliberate efforts to shock (I find it fascinating, and quite enjoyable).

The Third and Fourth symphonies were each quarried from other works, the former from an opera, The Flaming Angel, and the latter from the ballet, The Prodigal Son. Prokofiev would come to be dissatisfied with the Fourth too, and he so thoroughly rewrote it in the late 1940s (unfortunately, not to its advantage), that it is catalogued under the double opus number of 47/112.

So the Fifth Symphony, written in 1944 when Prokofiev was 53, was the first one in which he was not either jousting with the form or using recycled materials.

Musical responses to war

The Fifth was a big hit from the beginning, and in the long period during which the Shostakovich war symphonies were devalued in the West, it was considered the symphony of its time. Prokofiev himself would certainly have had the Shostakovich Seventh and Eighth symphonies in mind when he wrote the Fifth, since they were profoundly identified with the Soviet (and Allied) war effort, and rights for the Western premiere of the Seventh were the object of unprecedented contention among the major conductors in the U.S.

By 1944, the war was won though not yet ended, and Nazi forces had been driven from the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe. This may not entirely account for the Fifth's celebratory tone— Prokofiev, like Bernstein, had a difficult time keeping animal spirits from bursting in— but it did make it ideologically acceptable.

The Copland Third was its American counterpart— although Shostakovich, expected to produce a triumphal Ninth to complete his war trilogy, responded instead with a modestly scaled, Haydnesque symphony of his own. (The subject of the symphony as a response to the Second World War would certainly repay study.)

Stalin's toady

The Fifth is Prokofiev's most conventional work in the form, with a large-limbed opening movement, a brilliant Scherzo, a lyrical Andante, and a rondo-like finale. On his return to Russia after two decades in the West, Prokofiev was quoted as saying that the sonata form was a perfect vehicle for his musical expression, and it's almost as if the Fifth was intended as a textbook example.

As with Shostakovich in his Fifth Symphony, it was a guarantee of popular success, although that didn't protect either man from the wrath of Stalin's toady, Andrei Zhdanov, in the notorious denunciation of musical "formalism" at the 1948 Composers' Union Congress. Even so, hints of Prokofiev's ballets appear in the music: Romeo and Juliet in the Andante and Cinderella in the concluding Allegro giocoso.

Prokofiev would compose two more symphonies: an introspective Sixth (to my mind a more interesting work than the Fifth) and a self-censored Seventh, but the Fifth has retained its popularity— quite justifiably, in the vigorous performance led by Harth-Bedoya.

The Curtis isn't just Philadelphia's other orchestra; it's one that many a city would be glad to have as its principal one. And unlike the Philadelphia Orchestra, it's happily exempt from wage and pension issues.