On Wednesday evening, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra, led by its young Music Director Andris Nelsons, conduct works by Gunther Schuller, Mozart and Beethoven. It was an unusually long concert that ran over two and a half hours but was so well executed that the time passed quickly.
The program opened with with Schuller's Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959). Schuller, who only passed away in 2015, was a polymath equally at home with both jazz and classical music. Few recipients of the MacArthur "genius" award have deserved the honor as much as he. Not only a noted composer, author and historian, he was also an incredibly talented horn player who worked and recorded with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Miles Davis. In 1959, he left his position as hornist at the Met Opera Orchestra to become a composer of what he termed "third-stream" music, an attempt to incorporate elements of both jazz and classical music within a single piece. Seven Studies is the best known of the works he wrote in this style. In it Schuller sought to find musical equivalents to seven visual works created by Paul Klee who was himself, of course, an extremely talented musician. As Schuller wrote:
"Each of the seven pieces bears a slightly different relationship to the original Klee picture from which it stems. Some relate to the actual design, shape, or color scheme of the painting, while others take the general mode of the picture or its title as a point of departure."
The entire piece presented a kaleidoscope of shifting sounds and impressions from one study to the next. Those that were most successful were the movements in which the jazz rhythms could most clearly be discerned.
It was appropriate that a work by Schuller should be chosen to open a Boston Symphony program in view of his long association with the orchestra. As the program notes pointed out: "He [Schuller] was a tireless educator, serving as faculty member, co-director, and director of the Tanglewood Music Center over a 20-year span..." In addition, he had received several commissions from the BSO including Where the Word Ends, the orchestra's 125th anniversary commission premiered by James Levine in 2009, and Magical Trumpets, the Tanglewood Music Center's 75th anniversary commission that premiered posthumously in 2015.
The next work was Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, K. 482 (1785) and featured Emanuel Ax as soloist. At the time he wrote the concerto, Mozart had only just passed the peak of his popularity in Vienna (the number of subscriptions at his 1785 Advent series, at which the K. 482 was performed, was 120 as opposed to 150 at that year's earlier Lenten series) and his work was still extraordinarily in demand even if he were beginning to experience the pressure on his finances that would haunt his final years. Among other projects, Mozart was already collaborating with Da Ponte on Figaro. So busy was he, in fact, that he did not have time to fully write out the concerto's piano part nor the cadenzas. There can't be any question that he meant to dazzle his audiences with the present work - this is one of those concerti that include percussion and brass in the instrumentation - just as he had earlier that same year in the K. 466 and K. 467 concerti. Hence the first use of clarinets in a Mozart concerto. And there are other elements spread throughout the work deliberately designed to make it more appealing, such as in the final movement where a 3/4 menuetto suddenly interrupts the much faster 6/8 rondo theme (an idea the composer had previously used in his first E-flat concerto, K. 271). But where Mozart really let himself go was in the composition of the second movement andante. Again echoing the K. 271, it is in the key of C minor, and the use of a minor key in Mozart's music is almost always a signal of overwhelming emotion, here emphasized by the muted violins. There are also variations in both minor and major keys on the movement's opening theme; above all there is a sense of operatic drama in the interplay between piano and orchestra. So affected were the concerto's first listeners that they demanded an encore of the entire movement.
After intermission, the orchestra returned to perform the most anticipated work of the evening, Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 (1804), the immortal Eroica. So familiar has this work become that it's difficult for us in the twenty-first century to imagine how revolutionary it must have sounded to its first audiences, and not only for its length, unprecedented in any previous symphony. This, the first explicit statement of Romanticism in a major musical work, turned the Haydnesque Classical symphony on its head. Here for the first time listeners encountered programmatic content in a symphonic work as Beethoven, with all the dramatic power at his command, detailed one man's struggle against fate. This can be seen most clearly in the second movement marcia funebre that can be viewed as much as anything else as a funeral dirge for the old Beethoven, the Classical composer who had been struck down by deafness and now no longer existed. The contretemps over the effaced dedication to Napoleon sometimes distracts from how deeply personal a work this really is. In many ways I believe that Beethoven had identified himself with Napoleon to a much more profound degree than he himself realized and had seen in him the embodiment of the Aufklärung ideals he had absorbed in his youth in Bonn. Once Napoleon had fallen from his pedestal, at the least in the composer's eyes, he was more than ever alone. It was he, once he had defiantly conquered his affliction, who would continue on the path the dictator had forsaken and would go on in his Ninth Symphony to affirm the same "rights of man" he now feared Napoleon would trample.
As usual, Andris Nelsons did a superb job on the podium. I've come to consider him the best of the younger generation of conductors and was more impressed than ever after having witnessed this performance. Under his direction, the BSO has once again become a world class ensemble whose concerts are a highlight of any Carnegie Hall season. I was especially impressed at this concert by Nelsons's handling of the Schuller piece; he demonstrated conclusively the work's power and importance as it swung from jazz to classical and back again. And Emanuel Ax, though he's never been one of my favorite pianists, turned in a solid performance on the Mozart concerto. That composer's concerti are so often played nowadays, and deservedly so, that there's invariably a danger the audience will not pay as close attention as the music deserves. But Ax, Nelsons and the BSO managed to keep the K. 482 as fresh as if it were being performed for the first time. All concerned did an especially fine job on the andante and I could well understand why its first audience had demanded its encore.
It was appropriate that a work by Schuller should be chosen to open a Boston Symphony program in view of his long association with the orchestra. As the program notes pointed out: "He [Schuller] was a tireless educator, serving as faculty member, co-director, and director of the Tanglewood Music Center over a 20-year span..." In addition, he had received several commissions from the BSO including Where the Word Ends, the orchestra's 125th anniversary commission premiered by James Levine in 2009, and Magical Trumpets, the Tanglewood Music Center's 75th anniversary commission that premiered posthumously in 2015.
The next work was Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, K. 482 (1785) and featured Emanuel Ax as soloist. At the time he wrote the concerto, Mozart had only just passed the peak of his popularity in Vienna (the number of subscriptions at his 1785 Advent series, at which the K. 482 was performed, was 120 as opposed to 150 at that year's earlier Lenten series) and his work was still extraordinarily in demand even if he were beginning to experience the pressure on his finances that would haunt his final years. Among other projects, Mozart was already collaborating with Da Ponte on Figaro. So busy was he, in fact, that he did not have time to fully write out the concerto's piano part nor the cadenzas. There can't be any question that he meant to dazzle his audiences with the present work - this is one of those concerti that include percussion and brass in the instrumentation - just as he had earlier that same year in the K. 466 and K. 467 concerti. Hence the first use of clarinets in a Mozart concerto. And there are other elements spread throughout the work deliberately designed to make it more appealing, such as in the final movement where a 3/4 menuetto suddenly interrupts the much faster 6/8 rondo theme (an idea the composer had previously used in his first E-flat concerto, K. 271). But where Mozart really let himself go was in the composition of the second movement andante. Again echoing the K. 271, it is in the key of C minor, and the use of a minor key in Mozart's music is almost always a signal of overwhelming emotion, here emphasized by the muted violins. There are also variations in both minor and major keys on the movement's opening theme; above all there is a sense of operatic drama in the interplay between piano and orchestra. So affected were the concerto's first listeners that they demanded an encore of the entire movement.
After intermission, the orchestra returned to perform the most anticipated work of the evening, Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 55 (1804), the immortal Eroica. So familiar has this work become that it's difficult for us in the twenty-first century to imagine how revolutionary it must have sounded to its first audiences, and not only for its length, unprecedented in any previous symphony. This, the first explicit statement of Romanticism in a major musical work, turned the Haydnesque Classical symphony on its head. Here for the first time listeners encountered programmatic content in a symphonic work as Beethoven, with all the dramatic power at his command, detailed one man's struggle against fate. This can be seen most clearly in the second movement marcia funebre that can be viewed as much as anything else as a funeral dirge for the old Beethoven, the Classical composer who had been struck down by deafness and now no longer existed. The contretemps over the effaced dedication to Napoleon sometimes distracts from how deeply personal a work this really is. In many ways I believe that Beethoven had identified himself with Napoleon to a much more profound degree than he himself realized and had seen in him the embodiment of the Aufklärung ideals he had absorbed in his youth in Bonn. Once Napoleon had fallen from his pedestal, at the least in the composer's eyes, he was more than ever alone. It was he, once he had defiantly conquered his affliction, who would continue on the path the dictator had forsaken and would go on in his Ninth Symphony to affirm the same "rights of man" he now feared Napoleon would trample.
As usual, Andris Nelsons did a superb job on the podium. I've come to consider him the best of the younger generation of conductors and was more impressed than ever after having witnessed this performance. Under his direction, the BSO has once again become a world class ensemble whose concerts are a highlight of any Carnegie Hall season. I was especially impressed at this concert by Nelsons's handling of the Schuller piece; he demonstrated conclusively the work's power and importance as it swung from jazz to classical and back again. And Emanuel Ax, though he's never been one of my favorite pianists, turned in a solid performance on the Mozart concerto. That composer's concerti are so often played nowadays, and deservedly so, that there's invariably a danger the audience will not pay as close attention as the music deserves. But Ax, Nelsons and the BSO managed to keep the K. 482 as fresh as if it were being performed for the first time. All concerned did an especially fine job on the andante and I could well understand why its first audience had demanded its encore.
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