Carnegie Hall: American Symphony Orchestra Performs Busch and Reger

On Thursday evening the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, performed its third concert of the season at Carnegie Hall.  This performance, whose theme was entitled Giant in the Shadows, featured the work of Max Reger alongside that of his protégé Adolf Busch.

The program opened with Busch's Three Études for Orchestra, Op. 55 (1941).  Busch, grandfather of the evening's soloist Peter Serkin, was one of those rare heroic figures who put matters of conscience above all else.  Though little remembered today, he was in the 1920's one of the most successful and highly regarded violinists in the Germany.  As Hitler rose inexorably to power, however, Busch decided he could no longer in good conscience remain in the country of his birth and in 1927 emigrated to Switzerland.  He angrily refused the Nazis' invitations to return to Germany and finally relocated to the U.S. where shortly before his death in 1952 he co-founded the Marlboro Music Festival with his son-in-law Rudolf Serkin.  The Three Études was one of the first works he composed after arriving in America.

It was appropriate that the soloist on the next piece, Reger's Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 114 (1910), was Peter Serkin whose father Rudolf had championed the work and was the first in this country to record it in 1959.  It's difficult today to understand how important a position Reger held in German music at the turn of the twentieth century.  A contemporary of Mahler and Strauss, he was seen by many as a genius of equal talent.  He was a fervent admirer of the music of Brahms (as was Schoenberg at a later date) and his work can be viewed as a bridge between that composer's classical/romantic style and the dissonant modernism first introduced by Wagner.  Though he worked with traditional genres, as in the present concerto, Reger was uncompromisingly modern in his style of composition; this earned him the scorn of critics and contributed to the neglect his music suffered after his death in 1916 at age 42.  It's not surprising then that the Piano Concerto, premiered by Frieda Kwast-Hodapp with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, was savaged by the critics.  While Reger was accustomed to dealing with such ignorance, he was nevertheless deeply hurt by it.  The Program Notes quote him as saying: "My Piano Concerto is going to be misunderstood for years … The musical language is too austere … The public will need some time to get used to it."

Reger was right.  The concerto is extremely difficult to appreciate on first hearing.  It's a terrifically complex work that makes no concessions to the listener.  Peter Serkin was superb in his interpretation this work known for its technical difficulty. One felt throughout that he was performing the music exactly as the composer had intended it to be heard.  He and the orchestra, under Botstein's expert direction, played together seamlessly.

I wasn't able to stay for the second half (the first half alone was 90 minutes long), but the orchestra was scheduled to perform Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme of J.A. Hiller in E major, Op. 100 (1904-1907). At the time the work was written Reger had taken a position as music director at Leipzig University and had begun to receive his first international recognition.  No doubt it was his residence in Leipzig that sparked his interest in Hiller who in 1781 had been appointed the first Kapellmeister of the Leipzig Gewandhaus.  Like the later and much better known Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart, Op. 132, the present work allowed Reger to explore the traditions of German music, not only those of Hiller, an important figure in the development of singspiel, but those of J.S. Bach as well.  The work consists of a theme marked andante grazioso followed by eleven variations and then a long fugue introduced by the first violins.  The contrapuntal writing effectively allowed Reger to put the techniques of Bach in the service of modernism and in so doing prepared the way for the Second Viennese School.