The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia plays Schumann, Britten, and Haydn

I’ve written over 300,000 words of commentary on music and the other arts in the last 25 years, but I have to confess I share their feelings.

Ziegler’s rejection of metaphor strikes a particularly sensitive personal nerve. In my other capacity as a science fiction writer, I frequently encounter literary theorists who declare that the subjects science fiction writers write about are just metaphors. Intelligent extraterrestrials, for example, are “really” stand-ins for human ethnic groups, and stories about contacts with other intelligent species are just metaphors for their human-to-human equivalents.

But I don’t write about extraterrestrial contacts because I want to create a disguised commentary on human conflicts. I write about encounters with other intelligent species because I think it’s a real possibility and an interesting subject in itself. That may seem like a weird attitude to more conventional minds, but it’s the kind of thing that happens when writers are “content to be useless and...even irrelevant.”

Art for art's sake

For his latest return visit to the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the group’s former conductor, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, led three pieces that were prime examples of art created for its own sake. None of the pieces contained a moral or political message, and none of them demanded wordy explanations.

In his post-concert discussion with the audience, Solzhenitsyn called the pieces “straightforward.” Most listeners could enjoy them without any advance preparation, in his opinion. Repeated hearings and some study could enhance them, but it wasn’t necessary.

Solzhenitsyn conducted from the keyboard in the opening piece, Schumann’s Introduction and Allegro apassionato in G major, and he created an instant fairyland as he opened the concert with a liquid piano passage. The piece stayed in fairyland as the horns blended with the piano, and it remained there through the more declamatory passages in the last two-thirds of Schumann’s touching, beautiful creation.

You could hear that same aura of fairyland in the adagio movement of Benjamin Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, but Britten mostly had fun with a series of variations that included a march, a buzzing moto perpetuo, and an Italian romp with some strumming mandolin effects from the cellos and violas. Britten turns serious at the end, with a funeral march and a fugue, but the mixed moods add to the appeal of a fast-paced, inventive showpiece.

The finale was one of the most familiar pieces in the repertoire — Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony. Solzhenitsyn gave it a reading that sounded fresh and vital from the first bar of the introduction.

Solzhenitsyn’s annual visits with the Chamber Orchestra are a special treat for those of us who’ve been watching him develop since he was a student at Curtis. He obviously understood the special values in these pieces and knew how to bring them out.

In spite of my general agreement with my BSR colleagues, I believe the arts really do have a beneficial effect on most of us. I think reading science fiction has made me more imaginative and more aware of possibilities, good and bad, and I think regular contacts with experiences like Schumann’s fairyland and Britten’s high-spirited inventiveness have made me more sensitive and appreciative than I might have been. But those effects are byproducts. They can only be byproducts. If we make them the primary aim, we end up churning out sermons and lectures. We all know how much good those do.