Carnegie Hall: ASO Performs Schuller, Dutilleux, Muhly and Strauss

The American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by its music director Leon Botstein, gave its first performance of the season - a benefit for itself - at Carnegie Hall on Friday evening.  The ASO is a valuable resource that provides listeners with an opportunity to hear a number of modern and contemporary works that most mainstream orchestras, more dependent on ticket sales, play rarely if at all.  The first half of the program consisted of compositions by Gunther Schuller, Henri Dutilleux and Nico Muhly while in the second half the orchestra gave its interpretation of a well known tone poem by Strauss.  The theme announced for the evening, intended to provide a common thread for these wildly different compositions, was impressively titled Mimesis: Musical Representations.  In explaining the title in his introduction to the Program Notes, Botstein asked the unanswerable (and grammatically defective) question: "How does music mean?"  There wasn't really any need for such speculation, though, as these musical works were strong enough on their own merits that they did not need the encumbrance of any philosophical baggage.

The evening began with Schuller's Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959).  Schuller, who only died this past June, was a polymath equally at home with both jazz and classical music.  Few recipients of the MacArthur "genius" award have deserved the honor as much as he.  Not only a noted composer, author and historian, he was also an incredibly talented horn player who worked and recorded with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Miles Davis.  In 1959, he left his position as hornist at the Met Opera Orchestra to become a composer of what he termed "third-stream" music, an attempt to incorporate elements of both jazz and classical music within a single piece.  Seven Studies is the most famous of the works he wrote in this style.  In it Schuller sought to find musical equivalents to seven visual works created by Paul Klee who was himself, of course, an extremely talented musician.  As Schuller wrote:

"Each of the seven pieces bears a slightly different relationship to the original Klee picture from which it stems.  Some relate to the actual design, shape, or color scheme of the painting, while others take the general mode of the picture or its title as a point of departure."

The entire piece presented a kaleidoscope of shifting sounds and impressions from one study to the next.  Those that were most successful were the movements in which the jazz rhythms could most clearly be discerned.

The next work was Dutilleux's Correspondances (2002-2003), a choral work that the composer first revised to include a new movement for an additional Rilke text and then altered yet again shortly before his death in 2013 in order to provide a different finale for a recording being sung by soprano Barbara Hannigan.  (Dutilleux was fascinated by the vocal artists with whom he came in contact.)  The title is taken from a poem by Baudelaire though the composer did not set the verse itself to music.  Instead, each of the five movements takes as its text poems and letters written by Rilke (first and fourth movements), Mukherjee (second movement), Solzhenitsyn (third movement) and Van Gogh (fifth movement).  The soloist here was Sophia Burgos, a graduate student at Bard who in 2014 appeared at the Lucerne Festival and in 2015 at Tanglewood; she did an excellent job in conveying to the audience the power of the texts contained within Dutilleux's musical settings.

Following intermission,  the orchestra returned with Muhly's Seeing is Believing (2007).  I have to admit that before this concert I had never heard of Muhly even though he is located here in New York City.  I also wasn't sure what to expect of his music.  On his website (as well as within the Program Notes), he described the present piece as follows:

"Seeing is Believing references the exciting and superstitious practice of observing and mapping the sky; while writing it, I wanted to mimic the process by which, through observation, a series of points becomes a line   This seemed like the most appropriate way to think about a soloist versus an orchestra. The electric violin is such a specifically evocative instrument and has always reminded me of the 1980’s, and I tried, at times, to reference the music attendant to 80’s educational videos about science, which always sounded vast and mechanical and sometimes, quite romantic."

I found the music compelling even though I failed to find within it the promised reminiscences of the 1980's.  And Muhly deserves credit for having implemented so well the unique sound of the electric violin.  The soloist Tracy Silverman played remarkably well on his chosen instrument and was in large part responsible for the work's success at this concert.

The final work on the program was Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896).  To tell the truth, I have never particularly cared for Strauss's tone poems.  To me, their hubris represents perfectly the arrogance and hauteur that Germany displayed at the turn of the twentieth century as it goosestepped blindly toward the cataclysm of World War I.  Nevertheless, this is probably the most familiar piece the ASO has attempted in recent memory and listening to it gave me a chance to better judge the ability of the orchestra and its conductor.  All in all, it was an excellent performance and Botstein, even if his approach to music is at times too intellectual for my taste, an insightful conductor.  By the end of the evening, I had heard several excellent contemporary pieces for the first time and had had an enjoyable experience.