an historic occasion: the double premiere of BSO commissions

Boston Symphony Orchestra
Saturday, 26 March 2005

James Levine conducting

HARBISON  Darkbloom: Overture for an imagined opera (2005). World premiere; BSO commission.
STRAVINSKY  Movements for piano and orchestra (1959).
WUORINEN  Fourth Piano Concerto (2003). World premiere; BSO commission.
Peter Serkin, piano
BRAHMS  Symphony No. 2 in D, Opus 73 (1877)

March 26 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

I

In his final appearance with the BSO in the regular 2004-2005 season, James Levine presided over what is without exaggeration an historic occasion: the double premiere of BSO commissions from Boston’s John Harbison and New York’s Charles Wuorinen, separated by a rare (and exquisitely executed) performance of Stravinsky’s Movements for piano and orchestra, completed in 1959 (before I was born, and therefore an historical piece as far as I’m concerned ... let some nonagenarian call Stravinsky a ‘modern’ if he likes).

The first two pieces on the program were in effect a kind of counterpoint one against another.

At age 67, Harbison reached back to an incomplete opera project, regrettably abandoned partly for reasons external to the composition, partly out of irreconciliation between source and a stage adaptation.

At age 76, Stravinsky embarked on an eight-minute piece of such comparative novelty in his own oeuvre, that the harmonic complexity of his own piece amazed him, “in view of the fact that in Threni simple triadic references occur in every bar.” (Stravinsky’s largest work after the Mozartean The Rake’s Progress, Threni is nearly half an hour’s duration, so Igor Fyodorovich is speaking of triadic references in each of some 419 measures.)

Artists are surely allowed differences in temperament and method; goodness knows what a dull affair music history would be, if all composers thought alike. Yet it was striking to witness Stravinsky’s piece, essentially a chamber work - there’s a short passage in the Movements where the pianist depresses a couple of keys silently, the idea being that other notes sounding in the orchestra will cause the released strings of the piano to vibrate in sympathy, but this is a subtlety which is necessarily lost in so large a space as Symphony Hall - in effect upstaging a new orchestral work by Harbison. (In fairness, there are those who attended the concert on Saturday, who felt that the Brahms Symphony No. 2 in the second part of the concert entirely upstaged the modern first part, and who perfunctorily applauded between movements of the Brahms, partly to signify a kind of protest, I think.)

Comparisons are odorous, runs the famous malapropism. Musical comparison is a thornier variety than many. Perhaps the Stravinsky is a poor example of its idiom, and the Harbison a fine example of its own. And even comparing acknowledged pinnacles of two different musical styles, can be a dubious exercise; who will offer to compare the Bach St. Matthew Passion with Beethoven’s late string quartets, for instance? Pieces deserve to be judged on their own merits.

Yet comparisons are routinely made. A musical friend of mine, who traveled in to Boston specifically for this occasion, reported the playful but telling reaction of his lovely wife: "The Harbison was tolerable; the Stravinsky was awful, but brief; the Wuorinen was as bad as the Stravinsky, only ever so much longer."

II

The adjective “tolerable” short-changes Harbison; Darkbloom is largely pleasant (to use the word broadly, and though I must seemingly specify that “pleasant” is a positive musical attribute in my lexicon). It is an overture which we may find has become standard concert fare in ten, fifteen years. This has been the good fortune of Bernstein’s Overture to Candide; and Bernstein and Harbison are both composers partly concerned with some kind of musical reconciliation between classical and popular idioms.

There’s a sense in which non-musical connections may be easier for the audience in the case of the Harbison, than either the Stravinsky or Wuorinen; indeed multi-layered extramusical connections. There is the story which would have been told in the abandoned opera; and there is the story of abandoning the opera. In his remarks on the piece, Harbison writes: “I no longer have an interest in composing unproduceable operas.” This compares rather ironically with a certain other US composer, whose operas apparently exult in the publicity generated by controversy.

And it contrasts, incidentally, with another recent work of Wuorinen’s, the children’s opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The twentieth century in opera seemed to gravitate heavily towards dark emotions, sordid stories and increasing violence; so much so, that one finds producers of opera applying these aesthetic principles retroactively to historical operas, making for an uneasy artistic fit (but see “publicity generated by controversy,” above). Where Wuorinen’s work, based on a book by Salman Rushdie, looks back in some wise to a different operatic tradition, allied to the fairy-tale operas of Rimsky-Korsakov.

III

Comparisons, odd comparisons.

Steven Ledbetter, in his excellent program notes on the Stravinsky, cites a remark by Stephen Walsh: “the bolder writing of the Allegro passages has an American zip to it, with a hint of Copland or Carter.” Now, I’m all for finding good American elements wherever they might manifest themselves, and especially in the Arts. But Walsh here has plunged right into the maelstrom of the question of Meaning in Music; what would “American zip” be? Bold gestures in Stravinsky’s Allegro writing long predate his immigration to the US; and while the overall tone of the piece is the light of Stravinsky directed to some extent through Webern’s prism, I wonder if Walsh can really find anything rhythmic in the score of Movements which is at such a geography-specific remove from the Symphony in Three Movements. If Walsh detects a hint of Copland or Carter, his hint is not really open to argument, to be sure. But we might note that Copland studied in Paris, and that Stravinsky’s neoclassicism was a key influence upon Copland at one point. Do the bold gestures mean something American? I am not sanguine. Nor do I think the question of particular importance. The music should be good music.

The Stravinsky Movements is both like and unlike Webern, is in fact a creative and energetic artistic response to Webern (to whose work Robert Craft was responsible for introducing Stravinsky). Like the greater part of Webern’s oeuvre, Movements is concentrated and concise. Like all of Stravinsky’s catalogue, there are striking colors which of themselves are a delight to hear; the punning timbral shading of the repeated notes in both piano and harp in the second movement; another passage, in the first, where the harp begins by doubling the piano, and then the celesta joins the harp in a counterpoint more of timbre than of melodic imitation.

It takes longer to write of these things, than to hear them in the piece. We might consider this an icon of the shortcomings of using words to describe music, words which labor and drag the time on, where the music itself is fleeting, yet perceivable by the ear before the mind may comprehend it. The light shineth in darkness.

Myself, I exulted in the eight minutes of Serkin and the BSO imparting fresh life to a Stravinsky score which may generally be honored more in theoretical discussion than in musical execution. One of life’s simpler pleasures, perhaps ... but it was a delight to hear the repeat observed in the first Movement, since the recording I know best is Stravinsky’s own (reissued on a Sony compact disc), whereon, mysteriously, it is not so much that the repeat is not observed, as somehow overlooked: the first ending is taken, and then instead of the repeat, this recording moves on to the second ending.

IV

Few, perhaps, would deny that a lot of weird stuff in New York has passed for music over the last seventy years; but let us draw the line, and admit that it were grossly unfair to blame Charles Wuorinen for being a New Yorker.

If it is true that Boston, somehow, doesn’t understand Wuorinen, perhaps Boston doesn’t understand the late Stravinsky, either. The programming of the Movements and the Wuorinen Fourth Concerto together is not gratuitous: there are deep-running ties. It was no accident that Stravinsky’s widow entrusted sketches left incomplete at the long-lived composer’s passing, to Wuorinen for ... let us say “framing,” for “completion” is not at all the right word for the Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky. Or perhaps a better analogy is the richly tooled casings which silversmiths painstaking wrought, with apertures through which features of a painted icon are on view.

The Third Piano Concerto (written for Garrick Ohlsson) fits more neatly, perhaps, the traditional three-movement, fast/slow/fast concerto scheme. The Fourth is - and I betray a recent preoccupation with a certain work of Prokofiev’s here - more a Symphony-Concerto. From the outset the concerto brought the listener into the realm of serious musical discourse (serious, meaning earnest, not ‘impenetrable’), in a way which both emerged from the Stravinsky which had recently ended, and which drew the nature of Stravinsky’s musical argument to greater breadth.

It would be very much outside the range of this article to dig into every detail of the Wuorinen. There were passages which are entirely characteristic of Wuorinen, and ample new discoveries as well: particularly an engaging, spare interplay between soloist, tubular bells and vibraphone, a sonic snapshot which recalls the closing pages of Svadebka (Les noces) and the Requiem Canticles, and which returns tellingly just before the end. And Wuorinen has a fine sense of musical humor, though it is often of a delicacy requiring a sympathetic listener. The three movements of the Fourth Piano Concerto are connected without pause, but the quiet stillness of the fermata which concludes the second movement has the teasing feel of a false ending.

“A false ending?”, I am impatiently asked - but that is exactly one of my points about Wuorinen’s work. If an atonal piece (if there is really such a thing as that unfortunate oxymoron “atonal music”) does not in fact feel like it should end, where it ends, this is a fault of the composition, not of the materials of the composition. (This was the first practical challenge, if you like, to the twelve-tone method: how do we know when the piece ends?) It is a measure of Wuorinen’s skill and mastery, that in a musical language which is in all practical respects freed of the gravitational pull of Common Practice, his soundworld is capable not only of endings which really end, but of the ‘musical joke’ of a false ending.

V

In a collective interview, Harbison spoke of how lamentation over Schoenberg (as in a recent, extended opinion piece in the Boston Globe) has become a “journalistic cudgel,” having “no bearing or relationship to the actual music”; to which Wuorinen added: “The only issue with any of this music is one of familiarity, repeated exposure to it. It’ll make its own case. Doesn’t need to be explained, it only needs to be played again.”

There’s a quiet insight here that endures, in spite of occasional objections (if a piece of music is genuinely bad, then repeated listenings will not convert it into good music, e.g.); and touches on the elusive balance between great art which rewards successive revisitation, and art - including great art - which in some way speaks immediately to the listener. The first time we listen to the Brahms Symphony No. 2, few of us will absorb all that it has to offer at once; but neither do most of us need to listen to it several times before comprehending at least some of what Brahms was about in the piece. This is one of the ways in which music is not an absolute science, but a medium which depends upon context and information. Take someone whose entire musical experience is [insert sub-genre of pop here]; play them a recording of Brahms, and it is possible he may get nothing out of the 19th-century German, at all. Does this demonstrate any irrelevance on Brahms’s part?

One reviewer of the Thursday evening concert chose to highlight what he reports as a tepid reception of the Wuorinen. But at Saturday’s concert, there were some, dotted throughout Symphony, who rose to their feet in a demonstration of warm appreciation for both Wuorinen’s work, and the brilliant command with which Levine, Peter Serkin and the BSO brought the score to life in fiery, urgent music.

(And what if there were few on Thursday who applauded Wuorinen? In the Green Room interview, Harbison also remarked, “I'm very optimistic. Somewhere along the way I became the opposite of worried. And I think it's because I began to understand the carrying power of the intensity, as against the rule of numbers. And intensity wins every time.” That is where the clear victory lay on Saturday.)

Wuorinen’s Fourth Piano Concerto is indeed a work which hardly any of us will entirely “get” on the first hearing; yet, if you listen with the willingness to give the artist the freedom which is his birthright (which is to say, listen without shutting off one’s ears because the new piece does not conveniently fit into the drawer we happen to have open) it is music which speaks to the listener immediately. In one sense, Wuorinen placed more of a burden upon (or, regarded another way, placed more trust in) the listener, by composing something as absolute as a piano concerto. Considering the rich legacy established in the genre of the piano concerto, and how dismissive we are right to be of those weaker artists who simply warm up the past - you should find it suspicious, if I could tell you all about a new work, in the short space of a review, and on an initial hearing.

But it is a good work, by a composer whose music is waxing strong. Serkin and the BSO will perform the Wuorinen (and the Harbison) again, at Tanglewood on 17 July. And there seems to be a growing contingent of Bostonians who understand enough of Wuorinen, that they follow his music with interest into the fresh terrain which a curious artistic imagination capably explores - and who are therefore eager for the repeat performance.

(Karl Henning is a composer, clarinetist and chorister in Boston; and Charles Wuorinen is one of Henning’s former instructors.)