Orchestra plays Bernstein and Higdon (1st review)

Bernstein's successor-in-the-making?

ROBERT ZALLER

A very sparse audience at the Kimmel Center Thursday heard the second concert of Christoph Eschenbach’s Bernstein festival, the mini-series of midwinter concerts featuring one or more of Bernstein’s works per installment. The occasion is the 90th anniversary of Lenny’s birth, which occurs later this year, and is probably as good (or bad) a reason for a retrospective as any.

For this concert, Bernstein’s first major work, the Jeremiah Symphony, framed a program that included the premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s The Singing Rooms and Schumann Second Symphony, a work for which Bernstein the conductor held a special affinity. Higdon’s works are also being featured in tandem with Bernstein’s, a maneuver that frames her against one of America’s most popular composers. This might seem risky business, for the clear subtext is that Higdon (like Bernstein himself, a product of the Curtis Institute) now belongs beside an acknowledged master, perhaps to be seen as his natural successor.

Risky business, perhaps, but not a rash bet. Higdon, now 45, is one of America’s most heavily promoted composers, enjoying more than 200 performances of her work per year across the country. She is also one of its most prolific, producing five to ten works annually. A good number are on commission, as is the case with The Singing Rooms, for which the Philadelphia Orchestra (and co-sponsors in Atlanta and Minnesota) requested a work with violin and choral accompaniment.

Conservative but not condescending

I can’t speak to the body of Higdon’s work, though I’ve liked what I’ve heard. The Singing Rooms, set to texts by her Curtis colleague Jeanne Minahan, is, I am happy to report, the real deal. Higdon writes in a conservative but not condescending idiom, and she has assimilated the dominant musical impulses of the last 30 years, including minimalism and the contemporary predilection for bright washes of orchestral sound, without sounding merely imitative. In this respect she resembles Bernstein himself: a highly eclectic composer who nonetheless produced his own distinctive sound.

The 36 minutes of The Singing Rooms were performed without pause. The violin, played by Curtis graduate and Tchaikovsky Competition winner Jennifer Koh, has an obbligato role, threading its tone through the orchestral texture almost continuously but never quite attaining the independent voice of a solo instrument. Sometimes the dialogue is conducted with large forces, sometimes small; one of the work’s most ravishing moments is a violin duet with the oboe. Ms. Koh handled this difficult assignment with aplomb.

Life as a series of rooms

The chorus projects the text almost as plainsong, in the spare manner of late Shostakovich, with the first poem repeated at the end. Higdon’s intended effect is to suggest the episodes that constitute the passage of a life as a series of inhabited rooms. I can’t say the poems impressed me particularly on the page, but evidently they inspired Higdon, and that was quite sufficient.

The Singing Rooms is one of the few works I’ve heard in recent years that deserves not only the occasional performance but a place in the permanent repertory. Paired with Bernstein, it suggested the continuity of a distinctively American musical tradition, optimistic in the best sense of the word while still engaging the serious business of life. It certainly cheered me to hear a contemporary work of distinction after the callowness of neo-Romanticism and the note-spinning aridity of much of minimalism.

Bernstein’s world-weary career choice

As for the Bernstein Jeremiah symphony, it still bursts with the energy of a young talent celebrating itself, even as it borrows happily and copiously from Copland and especially Stravinsky, with a pinch of Roy Harris thrown in. Like Samuel Barber, Bernstein had said most of what he had to say by the age of 40. Thereafter he cannily threw his lesser talent into Mahler’s far greater one, realizing himself chiefly as a conductor rather than as a composer. This career choice rendered him a world-celebrated figure, but also a world-weary one; the more he was lionized, the more disappointed he became. His ultimate tragedy— and it was a tragedy, despite the marvelous and (by any standard but his own) fulfilling career that he enjoyed— was that the music he so desperately longed to write had already been written by another man.

This ultimate disillusionment is still far off in the ebullient plangency of the Jeremiah Symphony. Eschenbach, who has an affection for the score, took the first movement rather too deliberately, but got better into the jazzy, Latin-inflected rhythms of the middle one, and was well served by the powerful mezzo-soprano voice of Rinat Shaham in the finale, which rode thrillingly over the trumpet that introduced her at the score’s climactic moment.

Eschenbach tweaked some tempos distractingly in the Schumann Second, too— a habit into which he occasionally falls, and the Orchestra, perhaps, had less energy to give at this point. Yet the music transcended the performance. Schumann composed the Second during a period of illness and emotional travail, and the wonderful Adagio has always put me in mind of the profoundly convalescent mood of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet. No one can play it as Bernstein did, but it shines nonetheless; and what spirit and invention abound in the outer movements. Even at the end of a very long evening, one could say as Schumann himself did of the Schubert Great C Major Symphony, that this was music one was in no hurry to hear end.



To read another review of this concert by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.