Jurowski's latest Orchestra 'audition'

The Philadelphia Orchestra has returned to town after its globetrotting month to face the announcement of a 20% reduction in its administrative staff and a 10% reduction in all salaries above $50,000 for the survivors. These will be difficult times. All the more reason why we need great music to see us through them.

There is never a good time to be between music directors, and the present hiatus— a problem of the Orchestra's own making— is particularly awkward. So Vladimir Jurowski's concerts with the Orchestra this week and last will receive particular scrutiny. It's no secret that the lithe, dark-maned Russian maestro is on the short list to succeed Christoph Eschenbach and his interim replacement, Charles Dutoit.

Jurowski could have chosen well-worn crowd-pleasers for his programs, but, like Sir Simon Rattle on his visits, he ventured instead into unfamiliar territory. After years of hearing Schumann, Brahms, and Strauss repeat themselves on Wolfgang Sawallisch's watch as often as Tinker to Evers to Chance, and the parade of warhorses thus far on Dutoit's, it was encouraging to see Jurowski eschew the obvious. The results were encouraging as well.

Well-meaning condescension

Jurowski began with Alban Berg's Three Pieces, Op. 6, although not before an estimable member of the cello section had delivered a ten-minute lecture on the atonal terrors to which we were about to be subjected. The audience seemed to take this undoubtedly well-meaning condescension in good part, but perhaps there were a few beside myself who had some familiarity with the composer and the score: Berg's piece is, after all, 95 years old at this point, and, although still more challenging than most of the tepidities that pass for contemporary music, hardly new.

Berg was a pupil, disciple and acolyte of Arnold Schoenberg, who seemed to hold the younger man in thrall; Berg called him a "father" although only 11 years separated them. He meant the Three Pieces to be a 40th birthday present to Schoenberg; it's also partly an homage to Mahler, whose Sixth Symphony was referenced by the three hammer blows of the march that concludes the set.

Vienna, just before the lights went out

One can't help but wonder where Mahler himself might have gone had he lived— he'd died only three years earlier, at 50, in 1911—since he'd already brought tonality to the breaking point and, in his incomplete Tenth Symphony, stepped over it. Reflecting on the Berg score, composed in 1913-14, I couldn't help but think too of Robert Musil's novel, The Man Without Qualities, likewise set in the last year before World War I and likewise written in Vienna. Musil, who like Berg and Schoenberg thought very much in musical-mathematical terms and set out in his great novel to deconstruct the idea of the self as composed of fixed qualities in more or less harmonious association (rather like tonal clusters), tried instead to imagine personality in terms of discrete events in a fluid field.

Berg proceeds with very much the same conspectus, although, like Musil, within an overarching structure. Large gestures are balanced against small, clipped ones, and a great deal is going on at any given moment.

Of course, Verizon Hall makes it virtually impossible to hear these abrupt shifts of mood and color properly— or in some cases at all— but Jurowski conducted smartly, and the Orchestra responded with energy and, so far as one could tell, precision.

Mahler anticipates his downfall

The large piece on the program was Mahler's early, hour-long cantata, Das klagende lied (roughly, "Song of Lamentation," although klagende has a harsher connotation in German). Its Turandot-like plot tells the story of a haughty princess who demands that her suitors bring her a unique red flower. The young knight who finds it is killed by his older brother, but the truth is revealed at the brother's wedding by a minstrel who has inadvertently fashioned a flute from one of the knight's bones. Perhaps Mahler was anticipating his own career in the anti-Semitic milieu of fin de siècle Vienna?

In any case, this is one of the most astonishingly precocious works in musical history, composed between Mahler's 18th and 20th years but full of mature invention and with a thorough command of the Wagnerian orchestra (part of it offstage). Mahler himself trimmed the score for performance, and the original version wasn't heard until 1934. Given the vast popularity of the composer's music over the past 50 years, it's surprising that it's still a rarity— even the gargantuan Symphony of a Thousand gets more hearings— but if you missed it this time around, it could be a long wait.

One of the most fascinating elements of the score is the way in which the score startlingly anticipates Mahler's symphonies. The tremolo that opens the second movement is that of the opening of his Resurrection symphony, and details of Mahler's Fifth Symphony can clearly be heard in the finale.

One of the 19th Century's greatest

In a sense—with Berg looking back toward Mahler in the Three Pieces and Mahler looking forward to himself in Das klagende lied— the evening was very much about the latter's great symphonic canon, even though none of Mahler's symphonies was actually performed. But this youthful cantata, the seedbed as well as the first fruit of an extraordinary career, fully stands on its own. If nothing else of Mahler survived, it would still be one of the significant works of the late 19th Century.

Jurowski can keep even the lengthiest works moving, as he demonstrated earlier this month in the New York performance of his fellow countryman Vladimir Martynov's Vita nuova, and he shaped Das klagende lied with similar command. The Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Singers Chorale under David Hayes, were both in fine voice, and mezzo-soprano Iris Vermilion sung fluently and powerfully. The other soloists sounded a bit undermiked, and the four boy sopranos and altos, representing the flute's song, were unfortunately off-key. These caveats aside, however, a glorious work was grandly served.

So much on Jurowski's end. Now, what about ours?


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