Carnegie Hall: Philadelphia Orchestra Performs Strauss, Shostakovich and Beethoven

The Friday evening program at Carnegie Hall opened with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in an excellent rendition of Metamorphosen (1945) by Richard Strauss.  It was fascinating to compare this late work with the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra, written a half century before, that I had just heard performed the evening before by the Mannes Orchestra at Alice Tully.  In contrast to proud self-assurance of the earlier piece, Metamorphosen is a reflective and low key work in which Strauss mourns the loss of the entire German civilization whose foremost representative he had once been.  A dense textured piece for strings, it conveys perfectly the ineffable sadness the aged composer experienced while witnessing the destruction of all he had once loved and while foreseeing all too clearly his approaching death.  As the program notes:

"The Munich house in which Strauss was born, the opera theaters in which he first encountered the masterpieces of German art and in which his own operas premiered, were damaged or obliterated.  'My life's work is in ruins,' he stated.  Nostalgia reigns in much of Strauss's late music, and in Metamorphosen the mood is even more elegiac and tragic.  He confronts ends: of the war, his own life, and also of an entire era of music."

Following the Strauss came the Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat, Op. 107 (1959) by Dmitri Shostakovich.  It was fitting that the work of these two composers should be juxtaposed.  Just as Strauss had been the premiere German composer of his time, so Shostakovich was the best known representative of twentieth century Russian music.  In his own life too he had experienced incredible distress and hardship while enduring persecution by the Stalinist regime.  Written for cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, this is one of Shostakovich's most important works.  Although entirely original, it is filled with the spirit of Russian music.  The difficult piece was brilliantly performed at this concert by soloist Johannes Moser, a last minute replacement for Truls Mørk who was forced to withdraw after a skiing accident.

After intermission, the concert concluded with Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, Op. 55, the Eroica (1803).  This is, of course, one of the best known symphonic works in the repertoire and long familiarity has obscured the turmoil that this composer too experienced while writing it.  Disillusioned with Napoleon and facing impending deafness, Beethoven overcame these obstacles to create a revolutionary work that completely redefined the symphonic form.  Even now, this epic piece is startling in its originality when compared to the works of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven himself that had preceded it.

All in all, this was a fabulous program performed by one of the country's best orchestras.  Nézet-Séguin proved himself a remarkable conductor as he displayed complete mastery of the radically different styles employed by each composer.