Orchestra Plays Barber, Bartók, and Bruckner

Yannick Nézet-Séguin came up with his own list for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s penultimate concert of the season last weekend, with Samuel Barber represented by his Adagio for Strings, Béla Bartók by the First Violin Concerto, and Anton Bruckner by his Ninth Symphony.

After the intermission, three Orchestra musicians, including retiring harpist Margarita Csonka Montanaro, were presented awards by Richard B. Worley, chairman of the Orchestra Association. The proceedings were cordial and the audience response generous, but none of the musicians glanced at Worley except for the honorees. “The world’s greatest Orchestra,” as Worley described it, has still taken a 30% pay cut on his watch.

The good news is that the Orchestra, certainly as evidenced in this concert, remains great. But that is a tribute to the musicians and their dedication to the art they serve. It remains a sad commentary on the Orchestra’s administration and the broader community that has failed to serve them. Nor is it an excuse that other orchestras, though in no case the Philadelphians’ peers, have confronted similar cuts. It is rather a reflection on America’s civil decline in general.

Ponderous tempo

To the music, however. I don’t know whether Samuel Barber ever regretted the success of his Adagio for Strings as defining him at the expense of his other work. It doesn’t seem so, for after scoring what had begun as the middle movement of his only String Quartet for five-part full string orchestra, he went on many years later to rework it for voices as an Agnus Dei. (Others have made versions for organ, brass, and winds.) It is not only his most popular work, but also probably the best-known classical composition by an American and certainly the most ubiquitous, being routinely trotted out for solemn occasions.

Nézet-Séguin took it at a rather ponderous tempo, emphasizing its dirgelike qualities. A lighter touch might have freshened the piece more, for Barber, although working in a Romantic idiom, was in many ways a neoclassical composer, and it’s worth remembering that he followed it in the original Quartet version with a fleet and mercurial finale.

Bartók’s stepchild

Bartók’s First Violin Concerto was the first of his six concertos, but the last to be performed. Its inspiration was, at least in part, Bartók’s infatuation with a young violinist, Stefi Geyer, but Geyer herself never performed it, and Bartók apparently made no attempt to have it played. When he composed another violin concerto 30 years later, he made no mention of its predecessor, and it came to light only 11 years after Bartók’s death in 1945.

This stepchild of a work, now the Violin Concerto No. 1, is a fascinating transition piece that shows Bartók playing with styles in search of his own voice. The first of its two movements, an Andante sostenuto, begins with a winding, widely spaced recitative for the violin, whose discourse continues almost uninterruptedly. The orchestra only gradually joins, and as the music works toward its climax, it remains rooted in an Impressionist idiom that partakes of modal elements and a free chromatic range.

The second movement is, by contrast, vigorous and extroverted and looks forward to the dissonant energies of the mature Bartók. The principal theme of the Andante returns near the end, framed by a marking in the score that indicates its autobiographical significance.

Soloist Lisa Batiashvili, in a shimmering blue gown that did her figure no disservice, projected the lyric yearning of the Andante and the rougher intensities of the succeeding Allegro with equal success and purity of tone.

It was to be a dozen years before Bartók shed the last traces of Impressionism in The Miraculous Mandarin. By that time he was 38, with nearly half his career behind him. This earlier Bartók has not quite received its due musicologically, but the First Violin Concerto is a significant part of it.

Reproaching God

Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony occupied the second half of the program and, at an hour in this performance, more than two-thirds of its time. At that, it is still “incomplete,” since the ailing Bruckner had begun sketches for a final movement before his death in October 1896. With what might seem in anyone else vast arrogance — or folly, considering the unforgiving critics of his adopted Vienna — he dedicated the score “to Almighty God,” and in begging for time to complete it, he supposedly (and no doubt apocryphally) reproached the Deity, saying that it would be God’s fault if he failed to finish it. But God might have been the wiser critic, for the Ninth as it stands, concluding with a stupendous Adagio, has always seemed to me a complete and completely satisfying work. The symphony has sometimes been played with another Bruckner work, the Te Deum, as a concluding movement, and efforts have been made to convert the finale’s 200 surviving manuscript pages into playable form. Neither experiment has succeeded.

In many respects the Bruckner Ninth is the culminating moment of Catholic musical piety, as well as of 19th-century music as such. Bruckner worshipped Wagner only slightly less than he did God, although Wagner’s Ring cycle takes pagan legend as its subject. But Bruckner is unmistakably his own man, and the massive, blocklike architecture of his music, with great masses of sound alternating with the most delicate of whispers, makes for a unique sonic world.

Bruckner does not develop themes but varies their dress, avoiding satiety in repetition and building to monumental climaxes, often intensely dissonant, that both confront and surround the listener. This modest, celibate man, almost painfully shy and insecure, created on the most heroic scale; but Stravinsky, oddly enough, is one of Bruckner’s heirs.

Nézet-Séguin led the Orchestra in a powerful, full-throated reading, with the brass particularly resonant. If Bruckner had ever finished that finale, it would probably have taken a second set of hornists to play the whole thing through.