The San Francisco Symphony's Dawn to Twilight festival
concluded with each of the composers, Franz Schubert and Alban Berg,
being honored with a performance of a composition from their respective
final years. The evening began with Berg's only violin concerto with
soloist Gil Shaham. The intermission was followed by Schubert's sixth
setting of the mass, D. 950 in E-flat major for mixed chorus and five
solo voices: soprano (Laura Aikin), mezzo-soprano (Kelley O'Connor),
two tenors (Bruce Sledge and Nicholas Phan), and bass-baritone (Jeremy
Galyon).
As had been the case with Berg's "Chamber Concerto,"
conductor Michael Tilson Thomas felt a need to orient the audience by
exposing them of some of the key materials of the violin concerto.
While this was probably helpful to many, this latter composition is far
more a work of depiction than the former. The "Chamber Concerto"
was the result of a student honoring his master, Arnold Schoenberg;
the violin concerto was a memorial piece on the death of Manon Gropius,
the "angel" of the dedication, who died at the age of eighteen of
polio. The concerto thus depicts in striking musical language the life
of a brilliant and beautiful girl abruptly cut short and liberated to
heaven.
The overall structure of the composition is almost
narrative in nature, which should not be surprising since Berg was
working on an opera (Lulu) at the same time as this concerto.
Thus, while a long chain of academics have celebrated Berg's
compositional technique, particularly in light of his use of a
twelve-tone row that essentially embodied a return to tonality, the dead
moose on the table that is never mentioned is Richard Strauss' Opus 24
tone poem "Tod und Verklärung." As a teacher Schoenberg knew that one
could learn much from Strauss without following his footsteps, so it
would be hard to believe that one of his best pupils would have been
unaware of this earlier representation of struggle with mortality giving
way to transcendence of the soul. However, Schoenberg also attached
great value to traditional structures; and, from a theoretical point of
view, Berg's concerto may best be viewed as a dialectical synthesis of
Schoenberg's formal structures with Strauss' more narrative-driven
approach.
Fortunately, in listening to Thomas and Shaham (who had
performed the concerto here with Thomas in January of 2004), there is no
need to take a theoretical point of view. For Shaham the synthesis had
more to do with virtuosity and lyricism than with matters of
structure. As he had done at his last visit, he filled his performance
with passionate energy, always playing off the many different ways in
which Berg provided orchestral accompaniment. This time around I was
particularly aware of the extensive breadth of Berg's approach to
realizing that accompaniment, and I have to confess that Thomas' remarks
probably encouraged that awareness. This was definitely the apex in
the entire Dawn to Twilight journey.
That use of the
definite article, however, would suggest that there was something
anticlimactic in the Schubert half of the evening. I have already
discussed the significance of Schubert's final year
as a time when he was as adventurous in composition as he was
prolific. Nevertheless, when we tally up a census of just how prolific
that year was, it seems unreasonable to expect that every one of those
pieces would be a hands-down winner; and, while there is no shortage of
Schubert's rhetorical agility, one has to wonder whether or not his
heart was really into setting the mass yet another time. There is too
much of a sense of the routine in getting from beginning to end, even
when Schubert's routine is one of ambitious harmonic and contrapuntal
excursions.
This was the first performance of D. 950 by the San
Francisco Symphony. By all rights it could have been a "new Schubert
experience." However, the Berg concerto may have biased the context of
the evening. Once we hear Berg's last words of his angel now ascended
to heaven, just about anything would involve coming back down to earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment