Friday 21 February 2014

A Repertory Staple and a Canadian Rarity

It's funny, last night's Toronto Symphony concert was billed as "Beethoven's Violin Concerto" and that was not  the reason I came.  Don't get me wrong, I love Beethoven's work, the first of the great symphonic concertos for violin and orchestra.  It just isn't likely that I would make the trek from Woodstock into Toronto (90 minutes minimum each way) just to hear that work.


The first movement of the Beethoven lasts as long as (or longer than) the other two put together.  With that kind of "heavenly length", you might expect the kind of barnstorming musical rhetoric that occurs in many of Beethoven's bigger works -- but no.  The movement unfolds at a moderate tempo, with a large budget of long, singing melodies evidently intended to make the most of the violin's true lyrical quality.  The second movement is one of those simple-sounding middle movements, also found in the 4th and 5th piano concertos, where the orchestra seems to be listening in rapt attention to the quiet voice of the soloist while the audience listens raptly to both.  The finale is a light-hearted, joyous rondo on a very country-dance-like melody.


The soloist was concertmaster Jonathan Crow, and the technical excellence of his playing was unquestionable.  Guest conductor Thomas Dausgaard drew marvellously light playing from the orchestra in all the many quiet passages, with the most delicate pizzicato notes from all the strings in the slow movement.


My only cavil was the interpretive decision to play each of the soloist's main entries in the first movement as if they were solo cadenzas, causing the entire orchestra to mark time while Crow took all the time he wanted to spin out his chains of notes.  The result was a kind of stop-start effect which, for me, detracted from the strong sense of forward movement that is so characteristic of Beethoven's music.  I've never heard this done by anyone else, either live or in recordings, and while it was interesting to hear it once the result was not -- for my money -- a performance to live with through repeated hearings.


The other work on the program was a true rarity in North America: Carl Nielsen's Symphony # 3 (Sinfonia Espansiva).  Given the popularity of Sibelius in North America, I've never really understood why Nielsen hasn't made the same impression.  It's odd that the elements making up his music sound very similar to Sibelius, when described in writing, yet the total effect is very different. 


One of the most important elements of Nielsen's music is its powerful energy and sense of forward movement, much like Beethoven and totally unlike  most other music being written during much of Nielsen's lifetime (or since).  Another is his focus on the inherent energy and force of life itself.  The subtitles of some of his works (Sinfonia Espansive, The Inextinguishable) refer not to the music itself but to the Life Force which informs it.  I sense that in this respect Nielsen could probably have held hands with Bernard Shaw, whose views on the Life Force dominate several of his plays.


Musically, Nielsen works in a diatonic framework -- that is, his harmonies are grounded in the traditional major and minor scales -- but he certainly doesn't confine himself to one key at a time!  The result is a style where you have to think of what chord Nielsen is in at any given moment, as the next main chord is almost certain to be in a different key. 


The first movement opens with an accelerating series of fortissimo chords which whip up to a breathless speed and launch the main theme.  This theme is nothing more than a rising and falling arpeggio figure, but it will reappear many times throughout the movement, and never twice in a row in the same chord!  The power of this opening drives the music forward with immense and expanding energy (hence, Nielsen's direction: allegro espansivo).  The entire movement is in triple time, a Nielsen trademark, and this suits the moto perpetuo character of the music.  In the middle the low strings adopt an oom-pah-pah bass to accompany a quiet theme in the violins, but this soon builds into a ferocious full-throttle waltz from the full orchestra. 


The second movement is marked andante pastorale but its pastoral quality is nothing like Beethoven's 6th!  The movement opens in a brooding silence, sustained horns and bassoons forming a pedal bass to quiet fragments of the other instruments.  Three times this is interrupted by long passionate melodies on the violins, mainly using the low strings.  After the third iteration, the music settles into a brighter sounding background of calm and stillness and two human voices, a soprano and a baritone, join the orchestra, vocalizing quietly but rapturously.  Nielsen originally penned a short text for this section, but then withdrew it and left the singers wordless.  It's a wonderful moment and no substitution with a clarinet and a trombone will do.


Incidentally, the program notes specified that this substitution would be made, but then an inserted sheet gave the biographies of two singers, Andrea Nunez and David Diston.  I'm willing to bet that conductor Dausgaard, himself a Dane and a renowned Nielsen specialist, put his foot down and demanded singers.  Thank goodness they were engaged, because both of them did a fine job with their parts -- the soprano role in particular reaches quite high but has to remain quiet.  I'm sure any other Nielsen fans in the audience, like myself, heaved a massive sigh of relief!


The third movement adopts duple time, and proceeds with great energy.  Most of the fuel for this movement comes from a sustained trill leading to 4 rapid reiterations of a single note.  That figure in fact is treated imitatively in a quasi-fugal episode before the movement winds down into a mysterious quiet coda.


The finale brings a sustained, simple melody built from the notes of the major scale, and for the first time the symphony pursues the melody firmly within that single key.  The movement then becomes a kind of rondo form, with that main melody recurring at landmark moments in contrast with other intervening material.  Another figure becomes the subject of a quasi-fugal treatment during an episode, and the main theme gets a similar fugal treatment near the end.  Finally the music speeds up into a grand climactic statement of the second theme from the full orchestra and the symphony ends with hammered chords slowing down, a mirror of the opening acceleration.


It's not often that a Toronto Symphony audience will burst into cheers for a little-known work, but Dausgaard and the orchestra gave this symphony such a passionate and convincing performance that many were moved to shout their approval. 


As a footnote, Dausgaard will be back in Toronto next season for three more concerts pairing Beethoven and Nielsen.

No comments:

Post a Comment