Sunday, November 8, 2015

June 7, 2009: Masterpieces, known and unknown

After two concerts of compositions of short or moderate time scales, the third concert in the San Francisco Symphony Dawn to Twilight festival of the music of Franz Schubert and Alban Berg moved into the domain of longer durations, representing each composer by a single work.  The evening began with Berg's 1925 "Chamber Concerto," scored for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments;  and the intermission was followed by Schubert's D. 944 C major ("Great") symphony.  The piano and violin parts of the "Chamber Concerto" were performed by Yefim Bronfman and Julia Fischer, respectively.

In the earlier concerts we were exposed to the orchestral pieces of Berg's Opus 6 defining the path that would lead to his Wozzeck opera and the Opus 4 orchestral songs, in which Berg's first honed his orchestration skills with shorter works.  Wozzeck was completed in 1922, after which Berg began work on the "Chamber Concerto," completing it only in 1925.  This was his first work in which he explored the use of the twelve-tone serial technique of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.  He also selected pitches on the basis of their letter-names corresponding to those letters in Schoenberg's name, his own name, and that of Schoenberg's other major pupil, Anton Webern.  The overall structure of the concerto is relatively conventional:  a theme-and-variations followed by an Adagio and concluding with a Rondo.  However, these movements are seamlessly woven together into a single fabric, integrated by a single twelve-tone row based on Schoenberg's name.  (The work was dedicated to honor Schoenberg's fiftieth birthday and completed, interestingly enough, on Berg's fortieth birthday.)

There is considerable detail work in the score of this concerto, as there had been in Wozzeck.  Berg even prepared a lecture before the first performance of Wozzeck in which he laid out all of his structural strategies.  I read the transcript of this lecture (translated into English);  and, as a piece of verbal composition, it stands right up there with his musical compositions.  What I remember most, however, was that Berg concluded by telling the audience that, now that they had been exposed to an account of how he composed Wozzeck, they should forget everything he said and come back the next night to enjoy the opera!

In the spirit of Berg's admonition, Michael Tilson Thomas kept his introductory remarks brief, concentrating on the musical "spellings" of the names of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.  Nevertheless, this is not an easy work to approach simply through its surface features.  The preceding Dawn to Twilight concerts provided a valuable introduction to Berg's sense of rhetoric (beyond the logic and grammar behind the arrangements of his notes);  and Bronfman's earlier performance of the Opus 1 piano sonata did much to prepare the ear for his piano solo work in the "Chamber Concerto."  (In a similar way Fischer's violin solos did much to prepare us for next week's performance of Berg's violin concerto.)  However, the only real way to prepare to listen to this concerto is to listen to it.  In many ways it is the perfect example of what Thomas had in mind in a quote he gave for the advance material for this Festival:
The most extraordinary thing about Berg is that in every piece, there is always a moment that—even on first hearing, even to the unsophisticated listener—is so radiantly beautiful, that you think, "I must hear that again."
There is, without a doubt, radiant beauty with every note that has been scrupulously arranged under the constraints of serial logic;  but there is also a remoteness to that beauty.  One can only get closer through further exposure.  This is a work that deserves to be played as often as "standard repertoire" concertos, not so that it will be familiar enough to whistle on the way out of the concert hall but just so that we can get closer to a beauty of expression that makes listening to music so worth while.

Schubert's "Great" C major symphony has no such problems with remoteness.  However, this is one of those works that reflects his interest in working with longer and longer time scales, providing an example of what Paul Hersh called "Schubert's heavenly length" in some pre-performance remarks at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.  [Note added after publication:  As Jeff Dunn observed in his piece for Classical Music Voice, the "heavenly" epithet originated with Robert Schumann.]  The challenge to the performer is to pace the work in such a way that its "heavenly length" does not demand the patience of a saint.  Thomas approached the work with a good sense of pace, modulated by the knowledge of how "to sort out the climaxes from the lesser peaks," as Bronfman had done in his performance of Berg's piano sonata.  Also, because much of that sorting out involves managing crescendos that build, Mannheim style, over extended durations, Thomas has taken an interesting "division of labor" approach, through which half of each string section starts the build, the other half picks up with a bit more strength, and all come together for the final impact.  At this level of excitement, the audience was left with the music still ringing in the ears on the way out of the hall.

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