Juilliard Lab Orchestra Performs Strauss and Beethoven

This week's Wednesdays at One performance was given over to symphonic works as the Juilliard Lab Orchestra, under the batons of two student conductors, gave a one-hour concert that featured the music of Strauss and Beethoven.

The program opened with Strauss's Don Juan, Op. 20 (1888).  The work was conducted by Gregor A. Mayrhofer.  This is one of Strauss's earliest tone poems, written when he was only 25 years old, and its immediate success helped establish the young composer's growing reputation.  Based on a fragment of a play by Nikolaus Lenau, who died in an insane asylum in 1850, the work is more restrained and less bombastic than Strauss's later tone poems, such as Ein Heldenleben and Also sprach Zarathustra.  It is also, as the Wikipedia article points out, a work of such technical difficulty that it is often used at orchestral auditions.  It is to the credit of the Juilliard ensemble that they would attempt such a challenging piece and then carry it off so well.

The concert ended with a rousing performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 (1811-1812), the work Wagner famously referred to as "the apotheosis of the dance."  The conducting duties were split on this piece - Jesse Brault conducted movements 1 through 3 and Gregor A. Mayrhofer returned to the podium to conduct movement 4.  The predominant sensation the listener experiences in this symphony is one of relentless momentum.  There are no slow movements in this work.  The changes of key in the first movement (from A major to C major to F major) are abrupt and create an impression of speed.  Perhaps this irresistible energy is what made the symphony so popular with Viennese audiences.  It was well received at its 1813 premiere, much better than the Eighth which also received its first hearing at this same performance, even if the show was stolen by the composer's thumping Op. 91, Wellington's Victory and by the mechanical novelties created by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, inventor of the metronome.  There were thankfully no such devices at this performance, but the audience was enthusiastic enough as it was.  All the orchestra members, as well as the two conductors, outdid themselves here.