He is famous for his intensely expressive madrigals, which use a chromatic language not heard again until the 19th century; and also for committing what are amongst the most notorious murders in musical history.His homicidal reputation is elaborated (with gusto) by James M. Keller in the program book for this week's San Francisco Symphony concerts, because the program begins with the first performances by the Symphony of Brett Dean's "Carlo," inspired more by the radical nature of Gesualdo's approach to harmony than by his proclivities for violence. The Wikipedia entry suggests that his approach to music was a result of having been "tortured by guilt;" and death certainly figures in the very first word of a madrigal frequently offered as an example of his daring approach to composition. Consider the following two paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry summarizing Gesualdo's compositional style:
The first books of madrigals that Gesualdo published are close in style to the work of other contemporary madrigalists. Experiments with harmonic progression, cross-relation and violent rhythmic contrast increase in the later books, with Books Five and Six containing the most famous and extreme examples (for instance, the madrigals "Moro, lasso, al mio duolo" and "Beltà, poi che t'assenti", both of which are in Book Six, published in 1611). There is evidence that Gesualdo had these works in score form, in order to better display his contrapuntal inventions to other musicians, and also that Gesualdo intended his works to be sung by equal voices, as opposed to the concerted madrigal style popular in the period, which involved doubling and replacing voices with instruments.[1]
Characteristic of the Gesualdo style is a sectional format in which relatively slow-tempo passages of wild, occasionally shocking chromaticism alternate with quick-tempo diatonic passages. The text is closely wedded to the music, with individual words being given maximum attention. Some of the chromatic passages include all twelve notes of the chromatic scale within a single phrase, although scattered throughout different voices. Gesualdo was particularly fond of chromatic third relations, for instance juxtaposing the chords of A major and F major, or even C-sharp major and A minor (as he does at the beginning of "Moro, lasso" [1]).One of the reasons Gesualdo came to the attention of my fellow students and I was that Igor Stravinsky orchestrated three of his madrigals, including "Beltà, poi che t'assenti;" but it is "Moro, lasso" that lies at the heart of Dean's composition.
Dean raised Stravinsky's bar in several ways. Most important is that his work is neither an orchestration nor a symphonic paraphrase. Rather, it is a reflection on a significant period in the history of music composition from a vantage point fixed firmly in the here-and-now (at least as it was when Dean composed "Carlo" in 1997). That here-and-now includes supplementing the orchestra (which consists of only fifteen solo strings) with a taped recording of a performance of "Moro, lasso" and a collection of sampled sounds, cued from a keyboard (by Peter Grunberg in these performances). Thus, the work begins with a recording of that opening passage of "Moro, lasso" cited by the Wikipedia author and uses it as a point of departure for what may be described as an "instrumental madrigal of equal voices," against which we hear further fragments of Gesualdo's music, which, as Dean put it, are "eventually reduced to mere whisperings of his texts and nervous breathing sounds," thus descending into those tortures of guilt that may well have inspired "Moro, lasso" in the first place.
David Robertson was guest conductor this week; and presumably "Carlo" was his personal choice to open the program. He brought a firm and confident hand to coordinating the fifteen solo voices, allowing them to weave among themselves with the same intricacy as the vocal lines of Gesualdo's madrigals. All this was achieved while further coordinating this activity with the electronic sources. His subdued approach to the score contrasted sharply with the more overt tortured expressions found in so much of the music of Gustav Mahler that filled Davies Symphony Hall for the better part of last month; but this low-key approach (presumably the composer's intention) simply increased the emotional tension of the performance.
While this was a fascinating way to begin the evening, it was far from the only radical gesture on the program. Joseph Haydn was never one to shy away from pushing the envelope that delimited the conventions of his time. When Johann Peter Salomon provided him with an opportunity to set up a new base of operations in London after the death of Prince Nicholas Esterházy led to the disbanding of the orchestra Haydn had managed (leaving Haydn's Kapellmeister title as a mere sinecure), Haydn took this as an opportunity to adventure beyond some of the constraints that his former patron had imposed (however gentle those impositions may have been). We tend to think of his 94th G major symphony in terms of its "Surprise" sobriquet, with that abruptly loud chord possibly intended to wake the dozing. However, that chord is but the first gesture in a series of variations on a folk theme that startle in a variety of ways, particularly through further abrupt changes in dynamics, highlighted by inventive approaches to instrumentation. In a broader context we recognize that evidence of those inventive games can be detected in all four of the symphony's movements.
Robertson clearly appreciated this broader scope of the "spirit of the Surprise." His relatively brisk approach to tempo brought clarity to all of those abrupt shifts, even if some of the executions last night were a bit more ragged than they should have been. The result was a performance best described as joyous, which may well also describe Haydn's personal reaction to the new stage in his career that Salomon had provided to him.
After the intermission Robertson chose to follow his coupling of Dean and Haydn with the B-flat major piano concerto by Johannes Brahms, Opus 83, with soloist Yefim Bronfman. This work, completed in 1881, is also an envelope-pusher in its own right. Having sustained attacks from critics who described his first D minor piano concerto, first performed in 1859, as "perfectly unorthodox, banal and horrid," he described his second effort in this genre as a "tiny, tiny piano concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo." Given Brahms' taste for sarcasm, one could assume that he was reacting to the critics incomprehension of the first concerto by providing them in advance with an incomprehension of the second.
The real brunt of his sarcasm, however, probably had to do with Brahms never being particularly comfortable with orthodox approaches to the forms of his time. As I have previously observed, there was so much virtuosity in Brahms' approach to piano composition that his chamber music for piano and strings would often sound like a "concerto for piano and very small orchestra." This concerto, on the other hand, may be a result of looking through the other end of the telescope. It has the four-movement structure of a symphony (including that scherzo) in which the piano provides an extension of the orchestral resources. Whether or not this was actually Brahms' intention, this seemed to be the approach that Bronfman was taking in his partnership with Robertson. Bronfman was hardly shy in taking on the virtuosic demands of his part (is he ever?); but he met those demands without playing up any virtuosic display. It was as if he was saying:
This is what I have to do, but it is no big deal. The real music is in Brahms' approach to the instrumentation, and I am just part of that instrumentation strategy. I am doing my job, just like everyone else in this performance.The twentieth century would see a wide variety of approaches to integrate the piano with the orchestra through a more seamless instrumentation strategy, but Robertson and Bronfman delivered a performance that reminded us who first broke the ground for such a strategy. This was not the Brahms one might encounter in the recordings recommended in the program book, but it was a Brahms that encouraged our thinking about those same "origins and legacies" that occupied us during last month's Mahler Festival. Taken in the context of the full evening, those origins and legacies could connect us back to Haydn and even further back to Gesualdo.
No comments:
Post a Comment