After having heard the WQXR broadcast of a concert given by the Staatskapelle Berlin this past Friday, I walked down to Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon to hear a live performance by this same orchestra. They were once again led by their Music Director Daniel Barenboim and the program continued to showcase works by Mozart and Bruckner.
The concert began with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488 (1786) and of course featured Daniel Barenboim as soloist conducting from the keyboard. The concerto is notable for several reasons. For one thing, it displays Mozart's increasing interest in using woodwinds, particularly the clarinet, in his orchestrations as a foil or counterbalance to the strings. Though the clarinet had been invented at the turn of the eighteenth century by Johann Christoph Denner, in its earliest incarnations it produced an unpleasant shrill sound, and it was only through continued modification that it achieved the much more mellow tone we are familiar with today. This was what caught Mozart's attention and gradually led him to consider the tone of the clarinet to be the closest in quality to the human voice. It can't be coincidence then that the composer used the instrument so prominently in a work composed at nearly the same time he was completing work on Figaro, the first of the Da Ponte operas. In this regard, many commentators have noted the operatic character of the concerto's second movement adagio, the only movement Mozart ever composed in the key of F sharp minor. Most of Mozart's slow movements are marked andante; none have the heartbreaking pathos that the composer evoked here. It is as if this supreme genius had been granted some foreknowledge how little time he had left in the world.
After intermission, the concert concluded with a performance of Bruckner's final work, the Symphony No. 9 in D minor (1896). At the time he began work on it Bruckner, whose physical and mental health had never been particularly robust, knew that he was dying. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, also in D minor, had all along provided a blueprint of sorts to Bruckner in creating the structure of his own symphonies, and he saw the parallels more clearly than ever while composing what he realized would be his own last work. For example, it can be seen from the surviving sketches that Bruckner intended to conclude his Ninth in the key of D major just as Beethoven had ended his own.
The other great influence on Bruckner's oeuvre had always been God himself. A deeply religious man, the composer had seen his symphonies to be just as much hymns to God as any liturgical music might claim to be. All the more so in this case when Bruckner believed he would soon be face to face with his maker and so dedicated the work dem lieben Gott. The religious overtones can be heard most clearly in the third movement langsam that Brucker explicitly termed his farewell to life.
The study of Bruckner's symphonies has always been a musicologist's nightmare. Even during the composer's lifetime there were endless debates as to what constituted the authoritative version of any given symphony. The problem was not only that Bruckner was an extremely diffident individual who lacked confidence in his own abilities, but even more that his fervent admirers for some reason did not consider him the best judge of what he was attempting to write. These well meaning but thoroughly misguided disciples were continually demanding the composer make changes that may have brought his works more in line with popular tastes but completely failed to take into account the composer's own talents and musical knowledge. This lack of certainty concerning the composer's true intentions is even more obvious in the case of the No. 9 than in that of earlier symphonies since Bruckner unfortunately died before having finished it. (He might, in fact, have actually completed it if he had not been forced to waste several years revising his earlier works at his friends' insistence.) There have been several critical editions published following that presented in 1903 by the conductor Ferdinand Löwe that offered only a mangled - there is no other word for it - version of Bruckner's vision. Adding to the problem is that the composer's sketches for a projected fourth movement are incomplete but have nonetheless inspired any number of academics to come up with arrangements that they would like to believe reflect Bruckner's wishes but really represent nothing more than guesswork. At this concert, the orchestra wisely eschewed these drafts and presented only the three movements that Bruckner actually composed before his death. This course did not not mar the integrity of the work nor lead the audience to experience any sense of incompleteness; as it was, the stately third movement adagio provided a perfectly fitting conclusion to this magnificent work.
No comments:
Post a Comment