XM Satellite Radio listeners who have been following the regular
broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic on the Symphony Hall channel (XM
78) may have noted with some interest Vivien Schweitzer's review of this past week's concert, which appeared in Saturday's New York Times.
Almost the entire review concerned the second half of the concert, a
performance of the "Lyric Symphony" by Alexander Zemlinsky, published
under the full title, "Lyric Symphony, in Seven Songs after Poems by
Rabindranath Tagore, for Orchestra, Soprano and Baritone." This work
will receive its first XM broadcast on November 18 and will probably be
most valuable to anyone interested in the evolution of composition in
the first quarter of the twentieth century.
As the above title
suggests, it is useful to regard this composition as a pivotal work.
On the one hand, considered only in terms of its content and resources,
it is clearly a retrospective reflection on Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde
in a variety of ways, the most important being that of a symphonic
structure, each of whose movements (seven in this case, six for Mahler)
is a song setting. On the other hand the title suggests (quite rightly)
an influence on the "Lyric Suite" of Alban Berg. Berg not only
dedicated this six-movement string quartet to Zemlinsky but also quoted
from the third movement of the "Lyric Symphony." Furthermore, as one of
my teachers observed, the rhythm of the first gesture of the "Lyric
Suite" is the rhythm of an utterance of the name "Zemlinsky," while the
final gesture of the first movement invokes the rhythm of "Alban Berg."
Beyond these explicit connections there is also the fact that Zemlinsky
was Arnold Schoenberg's only formal music teacher and was probably well
aware of (if not intimately familiar with) Schoenberg's Gurrelieder oratorio.
Zemlinsky selected his texts from Tagore's collection The Gardener,
which he probably knew only from a German translation of the original
Bengali by Hans Effenberger. Since radio broadcasts do not provide a
program book, one may find these texts at their entry
on The Lied and Art Song Texts Page, which includes hyperlinks to
English translations. In addition Brilliant Classics has just released
the out-of-print Deutsche Grammophon recording of this work made in
March of 1981 by the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Lorin Maazel
with soloists Júlia Várady and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
This is
one of those cases where familiarity with both the texts and a recording
of the music (for which the Web site for the texts will be useful,
since they are not included with the Brilliant CD) will enhance
listening to the concert broadcast. On the one hand there is more of an
effort to organize the texts around a common theme than one finds in Das Lied von der Erde;
and, at the same time, Zemlinsky has sought out imaginative approaches
to taking Mahler's rich orchestral structures to a higher level, while
occasionally recognizing Mahler with reflections of some of his
rhetorical gestures (most evident in Zemlinsky's approach to the
conclusion). The resources are not quite as massive as those of the Gurrelieder.
However, they certainly come close but are deployed with a transparency
that neither Schoenberg nor Berg could command in their orchestral
writing. The result is thus as much an adventure in sonority as it is
an exploration of a highly non-conventional set of texts. Finally, this
is a good season for the "Lyric Symphony," since Christoph Eschenbach
will be conducting it with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony
Hall during the week of April 29, making for a rich set of
opportunities to hear a composition that definitely deserves more
attention.
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