Juilliard Lab Orchestra Performs Mendelssohn and Brahms

It was a rainy afternoon in Manhattan yesterday, but the large and enthusiastic audience at Alice Tully disregarded the weather long enough to attend an hour long performance of symphonic music by Mendelssohn and Brahms as performed by the Juilliard Lab Orchestra.  This was actually the first opportunity I'd had to hear the orchestra, one of several sponsored by Juilliard.  According to the school's website:

"The Lab Orchestra is conducted by students of the Orchestral Conducting program under the supervision of Alan Gilbert, and gives both the student conductors and student musicians the opportunity to learn major works of orchestral repertoire while working each week with Maestro Gilbert and/or special guests."

The program opened with Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, Op. 26 (1830).  Though approximately the same length as an operatic overture, this roughly ten-minute piece was not composed as a prelude to a larger opus but was instead written to be played on its own as a self-contained work.  This was not at all uncommon during the early nineteenth century Romantic period.  These pieces were intended by their composers to evoke a specific mood or feeling and, as such, were forerunners of the much longer tone poems that Strauss was to create decades later.  The composition of this specific overture was occasioned by Mendelssohn's visit to Fingal's Cave while traveling through Scotland after first having visited England as a guest of the Philharmonic Society.  If a journey to the uninhabited island of Staffa off Scotland's barren coast seems an unlikely side trip for a German tourist on holiday, it must be remembered that Scotland was at that time, however unlikely it may seem to us today, a spiritual center of the Romantic movement.  This was not only due to the immensely popular novels of Walter Scott but also to the historical and poetic writings of James Macpherson that exerted a tremendous influence on German literature, most notably on the work of the young Goethe.  Macpherson claimed to have discovered and translated the poetry of an ancient Gaelic scribe named Ossian who had purportedly written a work entitled Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books.  Ironically, more than a century after Macpherson had been unmasked as an extremely talented charlatan who had concocted the poems on his own, James Joyce also made use of the name of the legendary Irish hero Finn McCool, from which Fingal is derived, for the title of his final novel Finnegan's Wake.  In the meantime, the British naturalist Joseph Banks, unaware of Macpherson's deception, had renamed the cave in the Hebrides in honor of Ossian's protagonist.  It must then have been a moving experience for Mendelssohn to have visited the cave whose original Gaelic name was An Uamh Bhin ("the melodious cave") given it for its acoustical properties.  He was certainly inspired enough to have composed one of his most powerful orchestral works.

The next and final work was Brahms's Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73 (1877), the most popular of the composer's four symphonic works.  While it had taken the composer more than a decade to complete his Symphony No. 1, he was able to finish the Second in a few short months.  If this is indicative of anything, it's that Brahms had finally been able to throw off his morbid preoccupation with Beethoven's symphonic works and become his own man.  This new found freedom is reflected in the music itself.  If it could be described in a single word, it would be "tranquil."  Gone entirely is the tortured soul searching and self consciousness that had made the No. 1 so ponderous.  But Brahms had not been able even here to entirely free himself from Beethoven's shadow.  During his lifetime the work was often referred to as the "Pastoral," a direct comparison to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.

The exuberant playing of the orchestra was fully in keeping with the spirit of the music.  They did a fine job.  Still, there is an inherent problem in listening to a performance by any school orchestra.  While members of established professional orchestras play with one another for decades and are thereby able to create a distinctive "sound" for their ensembles, that is simply not possible with an orchestra whose membership, no matter how talented, must necessarily completely turn over every four years.  Such a lack of continuity was yesterday worsened by having three different conductors - Jesse Brault, Gregor Mayrhofer and Nimrod David Pfeffer - take turns on the podium for each movement.  But this is a small quibble considering what a thoroughly enjoyable performance the orchestra put on for its appreciative audience.