Last week I attended yet another Wednesdays at One performance at Alice Tully Hall. On this occasion, the Juilliard Lab Orchestra performed an hour-long concert featuring works by Brahms, Zoltán Kodály and Stravinsky. Each of the three works showcased the skills of a different conductor.
The program opened with Brahms's Tragic Overture, Op. 81 (1880) as conducted by Kyle Ritenauer. It should be noted at the outset that the overture was not intended to preface any musical or dramatic work, though critics have endlessly debated tragic literary works to which it might be linked. Certainly there were no devastating events in Brahms's humdrum personal life that might have called such music forth from his imagination. Rather the piece seems to represent in the abstract the melancholic aspect of the composer's personality in contrast to its much more upbeat companion piece, the ebullient Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80 which despite its lower opus number was the actually the second to be written. Brahms himself commented to Carl Reinecke that "one of them weeps, the other one laughs," a possible allusion to the comic and tragic masks employed in classical Greek theater. The Op. 81 was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Hans Richter on December 26, 1880. Due to its dark content, however, the work was not well received. It did not fare much better when, conducted by Brahms himself, it was performed together with the Op. 80 (that work's premiere) at the University of Breslau several days later. Again it cast a pall over its audience. Even today, the Op. 80 is performed not nearly so often as its lighthearted companion.
The next conductor to take the podium was Sasha Scolnik-Brower for a performance of Kodály's Dances of Galánta (1933), a piece commissioned for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Society. Although Kodály, together with fellow composer Béla Bartók, was famous for the field research he had conducted in Hungarian folk music at the turn of the twentieth century, he claimed to have found his inspiration for the Dances in book form.
"The author spent the most beautiful seven years of his childhood in Galánta. The town band, led by the fiddler Mihók, was famous. But it must have been even more famous a hundred years earlier. Several volumes of Hungarian dances were published in Vienna around the year 1800. One of them lists its source this way: 'from several Gypsies in Galánta.'''
Be that as it may, Kodály must certainly have come in contact with this type of folk music, known as verbunkos, long before he set out to compose the Dances. Described as "a pair of sections, slow (lassú), with a characteristic dotted rhythm, and fast (friss), with virtuosic running-note passages," the underlying folk idiom is clearly recognizable in Kodály's work.
Elinor Rufeizen conducted the final work, the 1919 suite taken from Stravinsky's The Firebird (1910). The ballet is most significant for having been the then unknown composer's first commission from the Ballets Russes. The story had already been developed by Alexandre Benois and choreographer Michel Fokine by the time Stravinsky commenced work on the score. This was in fact the company's first original score and its success led directly to Stravinsky's later engagements on Petrushka (1911) and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913). As an early work, The Firebird represents an intermediate period in Stravinsky's career when he had not yet completely freed himself from the Russian Romantic tradition - the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov can easily be distinguished throughout - but was already moving forward in the modernist vein that would be much more apparent in the works immediately following it.
The suite chosen for performance, the 1919, is the best known of the three the composer extracted from his ballet. To my mind, however, none of the three really does justice to the original work. Of them all, I prefer the first, the 1910, which is the most faithful to its source. The full ballet score, which I heard performed several seasons ago by the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, is a magical work. Stravinsky, who after its premiere became an overnight sensation throughout Europe, well deserved the acclaim he received for it..
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