Monday, December 14, 2015

September 3, 2009: Every person's guide to the orchestra

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment