Penn Symphony plays Berlioz

Bowled over by Berlioz

DAN COREN

It’s been an exciting week.

On the evening of Friday the 23rd, after five days of watching exotic birds in the Rio Grande Valley (some valley! The only flatter place I’ve ever seen is Urbana, Illinois), I found myself madly sprinting through Houston’s Bush Airport, barely making the last plane to Philadelphia so that on Saturday I’d be able to hear Brad Smith, a Texan and the conductor of the Penn Orchestra, lead a bunch of college kids, many of them of Asian descent, in a performance of the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, that unique collision of a manic-depressive 27-year-old composer, post-Revolutionary French music, and Beethoven.

That I was returning home from vacation on a Friday at all had taken a bit of negotiating: I’m lucky that the Berlioz (along with Pictures at an Exhibition and Firebird) is at the top of my wife’s classical hit parade. I was just as much interested in hearing what the Penn Orchestra would do with two short contemporary American pieces, John Adams’s Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral.

Many of my readers may know that distinctive grinding screech that used to be the hallmark of the strings in student orchestras. Not once in the course of Saturday evening’s concert did the Penn Orchestra musicians come even close to betraying their inexperience with that sound.

That they didn’t is as much a testament to Brad Smith’s expertise with his aspiring musicians as it is to their manifest talents. In a generous and honest response to my queries after the concert, Mr. Smith allowed that some compromises were necessary. The Short Ride was considerably slower than Adams’s metronome setting of 132 and created the effect of a racecar being driven in a 45 M.P.H. zone. And to preserve his string sound, Smith had to back off a bit from the big climaxes that give blue cathedral its shape.

An experience to remember

So what, you ask? I have sung in one chorus or another since I was 15, and have been involved in many performances of masterpieces that weren’t all they might have been. But the preparation of those pieces, the opportunity to immerse myself in works like the Brahms Requiem and the late Schubert masses, comprise my most treasured musical experiences. As these Penn students played, you could tell just by looking at them that they’ll look back on the experience of performing Adams and Higdon in the same way.

In his introductory remarks, Smith said he’d been astonished to learn that the Penn Orchestra hadn’t performed Symphonie Fantastique since 1973. I was astonished to be reminded that the Penn Orchestra’s conductor at that time (when I was a member of Penn’s music department) would have dared to try it. There were no excuses necessary for this performance, though. Few other amateur orchestras could do as well with this hair-raising piece.

I’ve occasionally had the experience of tuning into the middle of an unfamiliar Berlioz work and wondering to myself, “What the hell is this, anyway? French, I guess. Written around 1890. Maybe even in the 20th Century.” And on this occasion, I was able to appreciate the brilliant, bizarre originality of this familiar work. The last movement is full of sound effects and harmonies that have since become clichés. It even begins with a motive that bears a startling resemblance to the Scherzo of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

A crime scene worthy of Law and Order

You’ll notice I haven’t actually said that I like Symphonie Fantastique. In fact, I regard it as a grisly accident on the highway of music history— or a lurid crime scene, the crime being the massacre of the classical style. Imagine the M.E. on Law and Order, S.V.U. reporting her findings to detectives Stabler and Benson. “Your boy had quite a night. We found all kinds of stuff in him. Cocaine and opium, of course. But look at this!“ She points to some grotesque but oddly familiar objects on a nearby table. “Big chunks of undigested Beethoven symphonies. That long distended pedal-point over there– looks like the introduction to the Fourth, doesn’t it? And those drum rolls– right after the thunderstorm in the Sixth, don’t you think? But there are all sorts of things I can’t account for, stuff I’ve never seen before.”

“But what really killed him?” Benson asks.

“I wasn’t sure, so I called in that young hot-shot from Queens. You know– that neat-freak…oh yeah, Mendelssohn. Something of a prig, but a smart guy. I thought he was going to hurl. But he poked around a bit, and showed me what I should have seen myself under all this junk. A complete collapse of formal structure, general systemic chaos. It’s amazing he got through even a few measures with all that stuff in him.”

(Think I’m overdoing it? Follow this link for a wonderful article on Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz’s relationship to Mendelssohn, and much, much more!)

My wife regards all this analysis with wryly bemused annoyance. “Isn’t it amazing how people just don’t care about this stuff? How they persist in having so much fun listening to it?” Well, she has a point. In fact, not long from now, we’ll get to hear the Berlioz again at a Philadelphia Orchestra concert, along with the Beethoven Violin Concerto. I’m even looking forward to it. But I bet it won’t be as much fun as the concert at Penn.

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As long as I have the floor, I can’t resist adding a little didactic note. One of the most memorable seminars I attended as a graduate student at Berkeley involved the operas of Etienne Mehul, a French composer who lived through the Revolution. It was a real eye-opener. Beethoven knew Mehul’s music very well. Devices like the thunderstorm in his Sixth Symphony and the funeral march from the Third were in fact already standard fare from, respectively, French opera and public concerts. (There is also a French thunderstorm in the full version of Rossini’s William Tell overture, which, in fact, had its premiere in Paris in 1829 as Guillaume Tell, one year before Berlioz finished Symphonie Fantastique.) So although Berlioz was indeed bowled over by Beethoven’s music, a lot of what he heard would have struck him not purely as innovation, but as dramatic reworkings of the musical conventions he’d grown up with.