The Munich Symphony

In the late mid-90s, I was in my early late-20s, and I stopped going to hear orchestra concerts. For variety’s sake, I’d choose a movie, play, musical, or chamber music performance – something different from the orchestra playing I did so often.

Recently, I thought I’d make a change. So last Tuesday, instead of Rachael Ray, Rachel Maddow, and American Idol, it was the Munich Symphony under Philippe Entremont (February 17, 2009, at the Performing Arts Center).

I think I will start attending orchestra concerts again.

The program notes mentioned that from its founding in 1945, the Munich Symphony strives toward “flexibility, the ability to adapt to all forms of music without inhibitions, and always being prepared to take on new challenges.” These goals have “shaped the character of the Orchestra.”

True, that. Last Tuesday, they sounded like not one orchestra, but four different ones.
I sat on the first row. Up close, you don’t get the blend you do farther back, but you notice more details. At first it was distracting to hear individual string players, but then I started to feel connected to them. I was particularly impressed with the cello section, perhaps because their f-holes were aimed at my head (did that sound risqué?).

The concert began with Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll.” Wagner wrote this piece as a surprise gift to his wife Cosima. It started subtly and tenderly, gradually swelling to the Romantic intensities more expected in Wagner. The orchestra had a warm and blended sound. I noticed that the strings didn’t use the big, schlocky vibrato that sometimes (to me) makes Wagner a bit over-the-top. This choice seemed appropriate, as the piece was conceived as a private love letter; it’s not Isolde dying for love.

Next came Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #1 (with Entremont as conductor and soloist). Right away it sounded like a new orchestra had taken the stage. The playing was muscular and taut, rhythmically vigorous, energetic: all the things we love about Beethoven. But this is early Beethoven, so the piece required a degree of Mozartean clarity. Entremont captured the blend perfectly. His passage work in the fast movements had fiery intensity without being heavy on the touch, and his choices of tempo and phrasing in the longest of Beethoven’s slow movements left us wanting more. He stayed seated to conduct tutti passages, and otherwise conducted minimally, giving the piece a chamber music feel – I noticed that the players looked at him more often than when he was at the podium.

The only downside of this choice: minor ensemble problems in the quiet passages of the first and third movements, when I imagine some the players couldn’t hear the delicate piano parts clearly. I suspect this slight blurring didn’t register in other parts of the hall.

After intermission came Webern’s “Funf Satze” (Five Movements). I’d studied this piece in music history and learned about its innovations in form, dissonance, unusual string techniques like col legno (hitting the wood of the bow percussively on the string) and sul ponticello (playing close to the bridge to get a whistly, scratchy sound). The 12-tone guys like Webern and Schoenberg are often not appreciated because of these un-beautiful effects, or they’re thought too intellectual and deliberately experimental.

However, in performance I thought this piece conveyed great emotional drama. There’s more than one way to convey emotion, after all, than beautiful sound (think Bob Dylan’s voice). The fragmentation in the writing, deliberate ugliness of tone color, and abrupt contrasts in mood, to me, sounded like the disorientation and confusion of the early-20th-century, post-World-War-I zeitgeist. When I teach Modernist literature again, I may play this piece for my students and show them some slides of Picasso, Matisse, and Otto Dix.

There was terrific solo work in the strings. The principal players evoked musical versions of T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, or characters from Hemingway or Woolf – at turns impassioned, tremulous, iced-over, adrift in a world befogged and befogging – but not hopeless.

Here’s what I mean. Movement Two:



And Movement Three:



Another abrupt mood shift with the last selection of the evening: Mendelssohn’s Symphony #4, the “Italian.” Not exactly an unfamiliar piece, and Mendelssohn’s not my favorite composer (too effervescent – like champagne when you want a good scotch).

This performance worked for me, though -- I think because they played Mendelssohn as if he were Beethoven (I owe this observation to James Cushing). Mendelssohn sometimes calls to mind a game of badminton. This reading was more like rugby. It had guts.

The challenge with Mendelssohn: his music is delicate and transparent, but also hard as hell. You have to make all those noodles and tough licks sound easy. That’s probably why passages from the Italian Symphony often show up in audition repertoire. I couldn’t resist moving my fingers along with some of the more challenging parts I’ve played for auditions. The Munich Symphony violas nailed every one. How does one say “Viola Power” in German?

What I found most impressive was the bowing precision. The fast spiccato passages were clean without sacrificing energy. Oftentimes they can sound too bouncy and frantic. Not so here. The ostinatos in the last movement – hard to keep together as everyone’s bow arms get tired – sounded like clockwork.

I thought the winds sounded great too – but I’ll leave commentary on them to a wind player (Linda, I think I saw you there?)

BTW, CLICK HERE for a great article on Mendelssohn in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

The Munichers, playing this sunny music, on a rainy night, in the middle of a tour, far from home, nevertheless seemed relaxed and even joyful. Many smiled at each other or to themselves, and the principal second violinist, a young Asian man with spiky hair, swayed in rhythm to the dance-like third movement of the Mendelssohn.

How’s that for music as universal language: an Asian guy in a stiff black tux, channeling Sid Vicious’s punk-rock hairdo, playing a peasant dance by a German-Jewish composer, in a German orchestra, for a crowd of Californians.

A symphony colleague told me that for her, this concert epitomized the dream of the Performing Arts Center: that international artists would have a venue to attract them to our community.
The PAC has been here longer than I have, so I’ve always taken it for granted. I’ve learned since that it only came to be after years of hard work, planning -- and ultimately, cooperation between the city of SLO, Cal Poly, and private individuals.

In these difficult times, I suppose we shouldn’t take anything for granted. So it’s heartening to know that SLO county music lovers wouldn’t allow a rainy Tuesday night, an economic recession, (and, in my case, the American Idol semi-finals) to keep them from supporting the wonderful artists that visit us through Cal Poly Arts.

DH

BTW: here’s Phillippe Entremont playing Chopin’s Polonaise in C# minor.


PS. Why is the viola called “Bratsche” in German?
That’s the sound it makes when you sit on it.