On Saturday evening WQXR, New York's classical music, station broadcast another concert live from Carnegie Hall. On this occasion, the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst, performed works by Brahms, Schubert and Bartók. I had been particularly interested in hearing this concert as I would be going the next afternoon to Carnegie Hall to hear the same ensemble perform a different program, but one that also included a Schubert symphony.
The program opened with Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 (1854-1858) featuring Rudolf Buchbinder as soloist. Even in his youth, Brahms was among the most deliberate of composers and at the same time his harshest critic. It's not surprising then that he should have vacillated over his first major orchestral work. He began work on it in 1854 shortly after having met the Schumanns. His first planned it as a a sonata for two pianos and then considered turning it into a symphony (in the event, his First Symphony would not be completed until 1876, some twenty years later). As he worked on the projected symphony, Brahms, unsure of his abilities at orchestration, sought advice from his much more experienced friend Julius Otto Grimm as well as his lifelong associate Joseph Joachim. In the end, Brahms scrapped the idea of a symphony, discarded the second and third movements he had already drafted, and decided the music would be most suitable to a concerto. As a result of all this, the resulting piece is somewhat unwieldy and, with a performance time of almost fifty minutes, unusually long. Its initial reception was predictably harsh when the work premiered in Hanover in 1859 and then five days later in Leipzig with Brahms himself as soloist. This was not easy for an artist as sensitive as Brahms to bear and he later wrote to Joachim, "I am only experimenting and feeling my way, all the same, the hissing was rather too much." Even today, this is not an easy work to like no matter how much one admires the effort Brahms put into its composition. In the first movement especially it strives too hard the overwhelm the listener with its loud symphonic orchestration. The most attractive part of the work is the second movement that Brahms referred to as a "gentle portrait" of Clara.
The next work was Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 (1822) famously known as the "Unfinished." Unfortunately, the greatness of this work is too often overshadowed by arguments concerning the missing final movement. Personally, I think that because Schubert had such facility as a composer - it sometimes seems masterpieces flowed one after the other from his pen as if from a fountain - he simply put the work aside when he encountered a problem formulating its ending and moved on to the next work. Rather than endlessly theorizing over the symphony's incomplete form, it might be better to instead concentrate on its departure from Classicism, for surely better than any other work it announced Romanticism's triumphant arrival in music. This is especially true of the second movement, marked andante con moto, that contains some of the most beautiful music Schubert ever composed. Written about the same time as Schubert was diagnosed with syphilis - in the nineteenth century a veritable death sentence - the music may reflect the depth of the composer's feelings as he was forced to confront his own mortality while only age 25.
After intermission, the orchestra returned to perform what for me was the highlight of the concert, Bartók's concert suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19 (1922). Most concert suites are arranged by their composers after the original works from which they derived had achieved success. Of this piece, the opposite was true. So brutal and horrific was the full ballet that it was banned in Germany after its premiere in Cologne, and Bartók found it highly difficult to find other venues that would agree to produce it. Not only was the plot, taken from a story by the composer's compatriot Melchior Lengyel, truly disturbing in recounting the tale of a victim lured to his death by a prostitute, but the accompanying music was itself appropriately dark and brutal. At the time of its first performances, it was compared to Stravinsky's "barbaric" ballet music for Le Sacre du printemps. For those seeking solace in classical music after having just experienced the horrors of World War I it was too much. Of course, it is exactly the sense of horror expressed so well by the music that makes it attractive to modern audiences. Filled with dissonance and making use of virtually every modernist technique Bartók could lay his hands on, this is really the soundtrack of a nightmare and, along with the equally dark Bluebeard's Castle, one of the composer's greatest achievements. It celebrates a world that has grown seriously out of joint and given over to mindless violence and in so doing explores the deepest recesses of the unconscious mind.
The Vienna Philharmonic is unquestionably one of the world's greatest orchestras, but I was not overwhelmed by this performance. That may be because the program seemed somewhat haphazard. There was really no unifying theme that held these disparate works together.
The archived broadcast is already available for listening on WQXR's website.
The archived broadcast is already available for listening on WQXR's website.
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