Carnegie Hall: Met Orchestra Performs Schumann and Schubert

On Saturday evening I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the first of the Met Orchestra's annual end-of-season series.  The guest conductor was the inimatable Valery Gergiev leading the ensemble in a program tht featured works by two great Romantic composers, Schumann and Schubert.

The program opened with Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54 (1845) with Daniil Trifonov as soloist.  Although Schumann waited four years before adding the final two movements, the piece was actually begun in 1841 as a one-movement fantasie for piano and orchestra.  It was at his wife Clara's urging that he eventually expanded the piece into a full three-movement concerto.  That and the fact that Breitkopf & Härtel refused to publish the piece without the concluding two movements that Schumann himself viewed primarily as a means of balancing the first. What is unusual is that although Schumann was married to one of Europe's foremost pianists, the work was one of the few concerti written during this period that was not intended as a virtuoso showcase in the manner of those composed by Chopin and Liszt.  Indeed, Liszt condemned the work as "a concerto without piano."  The concerto instead hearkened back to those of Mozart and Beethoven in its integration of the solo and orchestral parts.  Schumann was more successful in accomplishing this feat than one might have expected.  Though he was already experiencing severe psychological problems, as evidenced in his Symphony in C completed at roughly the same time, he was able to fully overcome these obstacles in both the concerto and the symphony.  Of the two, the concerto is by far the more successful work and has since deservedly become one of the most popular in the repertoire.  Certainly Schumann was one of the nineteenth century's greatest composers for piano, and in this work he was able to meld that talent with his formidable ability in symphonic writing, albeit in sparer form, to achieve a remarkable triumph.  Mr. Trifonov was extremely impressive on Saturday evening; after having seen him display his virtuoso fireworks on other occasions, I was honestly surprised that he was able to work so well with the orchestra as he did here.  Even though this concerto lacks any flashy virtuoso turns, the pianist still had ample opportunities to demonstrate his considerable skill at the keyboard.  Of all the performances at which I've seen Mr. Trifonov perform this was definitely the most satisfying.

After intermission, the orchestra returned to perform the second and final work on the program, Schubert's Symphony No. 9 in C major, D. 944 (1825-1826), justifiably known as the "Great," in part to distinguish it from the composer's Symphony No. 6 in the same key and in part to acknowledge its own magnificence.  Perhaps there exists no more poignant testament to the relative anonymity in which Schubert lived his life than the confusion surrounding the numbering and dating of his symphonies.  Unpublished during his lifetime and even for several decades thereafter, the symphonies' chronologies had to be painstakingly reconstructed after the composer's death.  What a contrast to Beethoven whose works were published and assigned opus numbers almost as soon as he had written them.   It's now generally accepted that the No. 9 is the missing Gmunden-Gastein symphony  from 1824 and that it should therefore more correctly be listed as No.8.  The D. 944 might, in fact, never have come down to us at all if Schumann, during a visit to Vienna, had not fortuitously paid a visit to Schubert's brother Ferdinand who had kept the manuscripts in safekeeping and had even arranged for a performance of the symphony's last movement.  Fortunately, Schumann was as perspicacious a critic as one could hope to find in that period.  Immediately recognizing the symphony's importance, he sent a copy of the manuscript to Mendelssohn who successfully premiered the work with the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1839.  But even then the work was misunderstood by audiences and musicians alike.  The audiences found it far too long and the musicians, particularly in London, thought it unplayable.  It was only in the twentieth century, after Mahler and others had redefined the entire concept of the symphony, that the work finally achieved the popularity and understanding it had deserved all along.

One of the paradoxes of the No. 9 is that although the work is as carefully constructed as any of Beethoven's and scrupulously follows the traditional structure of the Classical symphony in that all four movements are in sonata form, it often strikes the listener as a much more personal statement than the works of Schubert's predecessors to the extent that melody is given greater weight than thematic development.  The orchestration also differs from earlier symphonies in the importance given to the brass section.  This is the first major symphony to make use of trombones as a standard part of the instrumentation rather than merely as a means of adding emphasis.  The writing for the horns especially stands out - the symphony opens with a solo by that instrument - so much so that it's difficult to describe its effect without resorting to the rapturous effusions of Schumann who wrote:

"A horn is heard from a distance.  It seems to come from another sphere. Here everything listens, as if a heavenly spirit were wandering through the orchestra."

In short, the work really is, as Schumann again pointed out, the first true Romantic symphony.  Listening to it, it's difficult at times to believe it was actually written during Beethoven's lifetime.  It seems to belong to another era altogether.

The Met Orchestra is one of the world's great ensembles and under the expert direction of Valery Gergiev it had a chance to shine on Saturday evening, particularly in the second half of the program.  One couldn't have asked for a better performance of Schubert's monumental symphony.  One curious point I noted was that Mr. Gergiev eschewed the use of a podium in the second half of the program and instead stood on the stage floor on the same level as the orchestra.  I'd be very interested to learn why he did that.