Philadelphia Orchestra's eclectic program

Some concert programs are built around a single major work; others present several in juxtaposition. David Robertson's Memorial Day weekend program with the Philadelphia Orchestra, featuring works by Vaughan Williams, Ades, Sibelius, and Scriabin, fell in the latter group.

Jan Sibelius, the eldest composer represented, was born in 1865; both Vaughan Williams and Scriabin in 1872. All three were avant-garde in their day; today, time and tide having carried them to a farther shore, they are seen as more or less comfortably Romantic. Perhaps the same will be said of Thomas Ades at some point, but Ades, at 38, is still a novelty and still, obviously, an evolving figure.

Strings get a workout

Robertson gave the Philadelphia strings a rare workout on their own in Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, based on the 16th-Century English polyphonist. This is very familiar radio fare, though no longer frequently encountered in concert. In its day, it was part of a movement to recuperate the world of older composers, presenting them in full Romantic dress. Respighi's suites of Ancient Airs and Dances was another such hommage, and Leopold Stokowski made the gambit famous with his Bach transcriptions.

Half a century later, musical tastes would recoil against this gallimaufry, and the period-instrument movement would insist upon strict (although largely imaginary) fidelity to the performance styles and sounds of the original period. Nowadays— time and tide again— Stokowski is newly fashionable, although not sufficiently yet for a full-scale concert comeback.

From our perspective, the Vaughan Williams Fantasia is a lush, late-Romantic work in period dress, with almost organ-like sonorities but quite delicate passages as well, and lovely solos for violin and viola. The strings seemed to enjoy their outing, and the audience as well.

Sibelius and his imitators

Sibelius's En Saga was the work that first made his reputation, although it's now heard in its later version. With its stops and starts and its abrupt changes of tempo and volume, En Saga reminds us why, even after a century, the Finnish master is still a stubborn original. Many composers have died twice, once of natural causes and once of their imitators, and Sibelius has certainly had many of the latter.

What no one was able to reproduce, however, was the sense of adventure in the best of his work, in which a deeply ruminative waywardness is somehow contained in a structure that seems to have a deep organic rightness and even inevitability. It was as if form and fantasy were perpetually at war in Sibelius, with both strangely served in the end.

A puzzling retirement

That such a resolution wasn't easily achieved is best indicated in the revisions Sibelius made to so many of his scores. I've never heard the original En Saga, but the earlier incarnations of his Violin Concerto and his Fifth Symphony have now been recorded, and the definitive versions are so startlingly different— and so much better— that one can only marvel at the travail of the compositional process.

Sibelius packed it in at 60, and spent the last 30 years of a long life in what was, to his many admirers, a deeply puzzling retirement. Maybe, at a certain point, the sheer labor of composition was too taxing a process. Silence— the silence in which En Saga, for one, leaves us— may have been the best solution.

Scriabin: From Romantic to Expressionist

Alexander Scriabin began his career as a solid late-19th-Century composer in the Russian Romantic tradition; he graduated second to Rachmaninoff in their conservatory class. But whereas Rachmaninoff would be content to mine that tradition for the next half-century, Scriabin soon moved into the Decadent-Expressionist milieu of the European avant-garde from which the Second Viennese School emerged, and there was a point in the early 1900s when his career seemed very much to mirror Schoenberg's.

Where he might have gone— a question that looms, too, with Mahler— is anyone's guess, for Scriabin's early death in 1915 ended a career that was still very much a quest. Scriabin's dreams, certainly, made Wagner's ambitions look small; he spent much of his last decade planning a synesthetic work called Mysterium, which was to involve virtually all of the senses, including smell.

Nothing performable of Mysterium apparently remains, but the titles Scriabin gave the last three of his five symphonies— The Divine Poem, The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, or the Poem of Fire— indicates the heady mixture of mystical aspiration and eroticism with which he approached his art. The Poem of Ecstasy is the most frequently performed of these, and it does seem a bit perfumed. A yearning trumpet call serves for the leitmotif that repeats itself insistently through the work, riding above an insistent sound-surge that rarely pauses for breath.

Wagner with stretch marks

The more than 300-line poem that served for its inspiration begins, "The Spirit/ Winged with thirst for life,/ Is drawn into flight/ On the summits of negation," which should give some idea of the proceedings. The style might be described as superheated Impressionism (a dish that should always be served at no more than room temperature), or perhaps as Wagnerian chromaticism with stretch marks.

Scriabin was a masterful colorist, so there are many incidental felicities. But 20 minutes of Ecstasy went a long way for this listener. The orchestra played very well.

Ades: a modern original

Thomas Ades's 18-minute Violin Concerto, Op. 24 was the novelty of the program. Ades is an eclectic, like most of his generation; nonetheless his work bears an original profile— or profiles, since no two of them I've heard are much alike. Most of the substance of the work lies in its middle movement ("Paths"), which begins with a flourish reminiscent of the Britten Violin Concerto and proceeds through a series of arabesques to create a febrile, darkly troubled mood.

The brief introductory movement, in contrast, is all high-register shimmer, and the finale a sinuous dance. As the work's subtitle ("Concentric Rounds") suggests, it is structured by thematic and rhythmic cells that orbit and occasionally collide with its major materials. This is not, obviously, the linear narrative of the traditional concerto, but on its own terms it was, at a first hearing, cohesive and impressive.

Soloist as fashion plate

Leila Josefowicz, who makes fashion as well as musical statements (shimmering on her own in shades of blue), handled the tricky solo part with aplomb, although once or twice her modest tone was swamped by the Orchestra. The audience responded with generous appreciation, both to the performer and to an all-too rare example of contemporary programming.

If I really had to choose an avant-garde moment from the concert, though, it would be the ghostly, rocking figure in the violins that begins Sibelius's En Saga. I'm sure nothing like it had ever been heard in music before. And the Orchestra played it wonderfully.