Monday, December 28, 2015

December 10, 2009: Precious moments

Among the generation of composers that began to emerge after the Second World War, there was considerable attention given to structure with visions of intricate details that would join together in service of larger-scale architectural plans.  Arnold Schoenberg's work with twelve-tone rows provided new ways of thinking about structure on both small and large scales;  but for this new generation the paragon of structuralism was Schoenberg's student, Anton Webern.  Many of the early essays of Karlheinz Stockhausen involved detailed structural analysis of Webern's scores, particularly in the period after Webern began to work with Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.  This made for an interesting parallel with Webern's own doctoral research into the structural intricacies of the sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Isaac.  As a result, the third quarter of the twentieth century became dominated by a highly academic (and often mathematical) approach to the syntax of musical scores, much to the disadvantage of matters of "logic" and "rhetoric" (if we are to use the medieval trivium as a baseline).  It took another quarter century of dry and tedious (not to mention tendentious) performances and recordings before another generation would emerge and recognize that Webern had composed music, rather than mere syntactic structures;  and we as serious listeners are now in a position to appreciate that awakening.

The merits of Webern's musical intuitions for such previously disregarded factors as rhetoric were clearly evident last night at Davies Symphony Hall in the San Francisco Symphony performance of his Opus 21 symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas.  This is a work of extraordinary detail in which every note signifies less through any sense of melodic line or harmonic accompaniment but rather through relations of temporal proximity that disregard boundaries between instruments.  Under a microscope this is musical pointillism (whose reductio ad absurdum emerged in Webern's 1935 orchestration of the six-voice fugue from the Musikalisches Opfer of Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 1079, Number 5).  However, Thomas pulled back from the individual moments of those "points" themselves, delivering the symphony with the same sense of musical flow we would expect of any other symphony.

I would not be surprised if it took considerable effort to achieve that sense of flow.  Among other things, it involves a heightened awareness by each musician of all other musicians, since that flow is not confined to traditional sectional boundaries.  Nevertheless, the results of that effort were clearly to the benefit of those still trying to find their way through the experiences of listening to Webern.  The one disadvantage is that such effort may have detracted from the preparation of the rest of the program.

That even included the other Webern offering of the evening, the first San Francisco Symphony performance of his 1931 orchestration of the six German dances by Franz Schubert, D. 820.  Here there was still a sense that Thomas was working through a microscope, wanting to make sure that even the smallest instrumentation decision behind every moment was not lost on us.  Unfortunately, what was lost was the underlying spirit of these short pieces as dance music.  It was as if we had been transported from the ballroom to the classroom, and I find it hard to believe that such a classroom was the venue Webern had envisioned for these earthy little pieces.  They required a little less reverence and a lot more Gemütlichkeit, and it is unfortunate that this staid performance provided our introduction to Webern for the evening and San Francisco's first taste of this side of Webern's orchestration skills.

The decision to couple Webern with Ludwig van Beethoven also proved problematic.  The two works on the program from the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Opus 58 piano concerto in G major from 1806 and the Opus 67 C minor symphony (the fifth) from 1808, are clearly products of Beethoven at the top of his game;  but the mindset established by Weber's symphony did not provide a complimentary light for either of these works.  This may have just been an unfortunate consequence of time management, giving far more attention to Webern under the assumption that the basic technical skills were already in place for Beethoven.  Such an assumption may have been valid enough, but neither the concerto nor the symphony emerged with sufficient identity to establish its own sense of performance.

In the case of the concerto, it also seemed as if soloist Emanuel Ax wanted to explore new approaches by going down paths that Thomas was reluctant to follow.  Ax certainly commanded attention by arpeggiating the opening chord, which would have made for a startling new perspective had Thomas worked with him to settle on a suitable orchestral response;  but, instead, Thomas just held to Beethoven's original playbook.  The result was a perfectly satisfactory reading but one in which the promise of new ways to listen to the familiar offered by that first arpeggio was never really fulfilled.

More disappointing was the C minor symphony, where an excess of rhetoric tended to diminish attention to the logic and syntax (to go back to the trivium).  As the old joke (first told to me by a trumpet player) goes, if you can hear the brass, they are playing too loud;  and there were certainly more than a few occasions when the brass was covering up some of Beethoven's more interesting writing, particularly when it involved the lower strings.  Then there were the timpani, which seemed to be struck entirely with mallets with particularly stiff heads.  This made every note a highly striking (pun intended) one;  but it left me wondering whether a visitor from Mars (who had not heard this music from childhood) might mistake this symphony for a concerto for timpani and orchestra.

If these performances were, indeed, a result of putting more time into Webern at the expense of less time for Beethoven, was that decision worth it?  As far as I am concerned, the answer is emphatically, "Yes!"  To warp the old line from Casablanca, "We'll always have Beethoven."  There is no danger that we face a future of concerts in which Beethoven will not get the attention he deserves.  Opportunities to hear Webern, on the other hand, are far fewer;  and every one of them should count towards strengthening the pleasure we can take in listening to his music.  Last night's performance of the symphony counted about as high as anyone could have anticipated.

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