Orchestra 2001 and the Mendelssohn Club

Western classical music planted deep roots in several Asian countries in the 19th century, along with other Western imports, and music audiences, East and West, are now reaping the benefits. Orchestra 2001 presented six pieces by five Asian composers, headlined by the premiere of a violin concerto by May-Tchi Chen.

The best-known composer currently living in Philadelphia, George Crumb, was mentioned several times during the pre-concert discussion, and he seems to have influenced most of the composers on the program. Like Crumb, they evoke emotions and images primarily through tone colors and sonorities rather than melody and structure.

Delicate and contemplative

Tōru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch 1 for solo piano drew more colors from the piano than any piano piece I’ve heard. Charles Abramovic’s playing was obviously responsible for much of the effect, but he couldn’t have done it without the colors Takemitsu built into his score.

Takemitsu’s title refers to a Japanese poem about a tree that collects raindrops on thousands of tiny leaves and continues raining after the rain has passed. Four of these pieces make overt references to nature in their titles. The title of Shin-Ichiro Ikebe’s Tanada refers to a terraced rice paddy built on a steep slope, and the piece begins with bright, glittering insectlike sounds and falls to a darker level. May-Tchi Chen’s violin concerto, Spring Reflections, captures most of the moods of a spring day, starting with an introduction packed with a sense something important is about to happen. You can take the title both ways: The dialogue between the orchestra and guest violinist Cho-Liang Lin reflects the spring, but it also reflects on it.

To me, all these pieces seem more delicate and contemplative than Western nature pieces. None of them includes the storm scene most Western composers seem to find mandatory when they write pastoral pieces like Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. But they all — like Crumb — give you the feeling they’re putting you in touch with the eternal reality that underlies the sounds and moods of the natural landscape.

A musical reprise

The Mendelssohn Club reprised a pivotal moment in music history, Felix Mendelssohn’s 1829 performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. In the years since his death in 1750, Bach had slipped into a low status that seems incredible today. He was still remembered as an organ composer, but his vocal works had been consigned to the library shelves. Mendelssohn belonged to a small group that had continued to play Bach’s music, and his St. Matthew Passion restored it to public attention.

Today, we usually perform Bach’s works with the small choruses and orchestras actually used in his day. Groups like Choral Arts Philadelphia and Vox Ama Deus even use the kinds of instruments played in the 18th century. Mendelssohn adapted the St. Matthew to the tastes of his own time. He conducted a big chorus and orchestra and cut the work to two hours. The Mendelssohn Club presented his version with the 170 voices it normally fields, supported by a 50-piece orchestra.

The large-scale version was just as intense and dramatic as the smaller, more historically accurate performances I’ve heard. Mendelssohn’s cuts left out bits like Pilate’s touching dialogues with his wife, but they sped up the action.

Two lacks

For me, the major difference was a loss of intimacy in two areas. The score includes parts for secondary characters, like Pilate, that are normally sung by members of the chorus; they seemed less immediate when they were delivered from the back of a big chorus. The obbligatos lost something, too. Bach accompanies the arias with obbligatos by solo instruments, and the interplay between voice and instrument seems more like a duet when the instrumentalist is standing near the vocalist.

But overall, the big 19th-century version is just as effective as our modern copies of 18th-century performances. Alan Harler conducted his big forces with a skill and understanding that maintained one of the fundamental appeals of Bach’s music; you could always hear the different sections of the orchestra and chorus as they created the individual threads in Bach’s complex sonic tapestry.

The Mendelssohn Club audience participated in a dialogue between three eras. A 21st-century audience experienced a 19th-century approach to an 18th-century masterpiece. In Bach’s own day, his audience would have heard the passion as the central event in a church service — a musical reading of a basic text of their faith. For them, the promise of eternal life in the arias would have been a literal truth. In that respect, Mendelssohn’s audience would have been closer to Bach’s congregation than most of the people in the contemporary music audience. Bach’s music creates a link that connects us to worldviews and attitudes that are just as alien, in their way, as the worldviews of the Asian cultures represented in the Orchestra 2001 concert.