This past Friday was the initial program in the first full season of
the Berlin Philharmonic to be delivered over the Internet as streaming
video through their Digital Concert Hall
service; and that concert will be available for viewing for the rest
of the season in the Concert Hall Archives. The program provided an
excellent opportunity to get to know the Philharmonic itself, its
conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, his approach to repertoire, and, of course,
the streaming video experience. Rattle chose to launch the season with
Benjamin Britten's "Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra," often
referred to by its subtitle, "Variations and Fugue on a Theme of
Purcell," when performed without a narrator explaining all the
instruments and their sections. This turned out to be an introductory
experience for both ear and eye, and the camera work served Britten
better than is usually expected. I say this because I had an
orchestration professor who emphasized that we should pay as much
attention to how Britten scored the accompaniment for each
instrument being featured as we gave to the instrument itself, and the
video director did an excellent job of revealing specific accompanying
elements that effectively highlighted an instrument's solo turn. The
introductory value also involved the extent to which this was a score composed for orchestra,
rather than conceived as some framework of harmony and counterpoint
that was subsequently orchestrated. The remainder of the program then
offered first a prospective and then a retrospective view of this
process of composing for orchestra.
The prospective view was
of "Laterna Magica" by Kaija Saariaho, being given its Berlin premiere
performance. Saariaho is no stranger to San Francisco. I know of two
occasions on which her solo cello composition, "Sept Papillons,"
was performed, one at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the
other by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Through this
work I came to know her as a composer seeking out ways to create with sonorities,
rather than the usual lexical primitives on which music notation is
based. I was therefore not surprised that she should scale up her 2000
cello composition with an effort to do the same with an entire
orchestra.
This poses a fascinating challenge: What do
you work with, if you choose to focus on the sound itself, rather than
abstractions of notes, contrapuntal voices, and harmonic progressions?
From a historical point of view, we might regard Arnold Schoenberg as
the first to pose this challenge with the third of his five Opus 16
orchestral pieces. By calling this piece "Farben," he established the
claim that he was composing a foreground of "orchestral colors," placing
anything that resembled harmony or counterpoint as far in the
background as he could manage. Whether or not he succeeded depends on
whom you ask and which performances you have heard; but this short
piece (less than five minutes) threw down a significant gauntlet.
In
the Fifties Karlheinz Stockhausen attempted to pick up that gauntlet
with principles of physics and psychology that could be traced all the
way back to Hermann Helmholtz' On the Sensations of Tone.
Stockhausen conceived of an electronic music laboratory in which any
sound could be produced provided one had a sufficiently large bank of
sine-wave generators and the right apparatus to control them all. For
Stockhausen this would be the environment in which composers would
finally have the power to compose with sound itself. Needless to say,
this vision never came to pass; and I continue to entertain the conjecture
that the latter-day Stockhausen went back to his roots as a jazz
pianist in the forties to seek out the new sounds that had eluded him in
his utopian laboratory.
It would be fair to say that,
ideologically, Saariaho is much closer to Schoenberg than to any of
Stockhausen's generational phases. "Laterna Magica" strikes the
ear-mind coupling as an experience that begins as somewhat of a cloud of
stimuli out of which perceptual categories gradually begin to emerge.
(One might speculate that this music invokes the process by which
neonates first acquire perception, but my guess is that Saariaho was not
quite that adventurous.) Ironically, as these "categories of sonority"
emerge, they proceed to keep company with the categories we already
know, engaging in dialog with rhythmic and melodic patterns. Put
another way, by the end of the composition, the idea of composing with
sonorities is now sharing the field with the lexical basics of melodic
composition; and the sharing is thoroughly amicable.
I felt it
appropriate to discuss this composition at some length because later on
this month the San Francisco Symphony will be presenting another
composer best considered in light of this challenge of composing with
sound itself. That composer is Giacinto Scelsi; and his "Hymnos" will
open the final program of the Mahler Festival (first performance in
Davies Symphony Hall on September 30) by preceding the performance of
Mahler's fifth symphony. This coupling is highly appropriate when one
considers Mahler's own keen sense of sound, but the rhetorical practices
of these two composers differ radically. On the basis of what I have
read, I do not think that Scelsi influenced Saariaho; but I suspect he
was another composer driven by the motivation to pick up Schoenberg's
gauntlet. (He would have been around four years old when "Farben" was
composed.) Taking this opportunity to hear Saariaho in full orchestral
force through the Digital Concert Hall may well be one of the better
ways to get the ear in shape for the experience of listening to
"Hymnos.
The retrospective view of composing for orchestra was presented through a performance of Hector Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique.
This work was last performed by the San Francisco Symphony under
Michael Tilson Thomas in December of 2007. It is probably one of the
most familiar examples of a work conceived as much in terms of
orchestral color as in terms of the interplay of themes. Rattle
provided a straightforward interpretation that did not try to belabor
any revisionist views of the music. There was only one point, at the
end of the fourth ("March to the Scaffold") movement, where he took
liberty with the score (at least my old study copy). The movement
concludes with a full-blast fanfare of percussion, brass, and winds to
depict the execution itself. Rattle chose to keep the fanfare at an
"intense mezzo" level, only building up for a fortissimo in the final
moments. The effect was as dramatic as he had intended it to be, making
for an effective way to throw a new light on an old friend.
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