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Die Schoen Berg New York
Carnegie Hall
03/07/2003 -
Alban Berg: Violin Concerto
Anton Bruckner: Symphony # 4
Gidon Kremer (violin)
Vienna Philharmonic
Nikolaus Harnoncourt (conductor)
Michael Tilson Thomas is absolutely correct when he states that the current state of serious art music would have been vastly different if Alban Berg had lived to a normal age. The premature death of this unique voice sounded the knell not just for a lone romantic genius, but for the rich communication between composer and audience, a phenomenon not successfully resuscitated since the bite of the wasp in 1935. It would be argumentative, and unjustifiable, to state that Berg’s music was greater than that of his mentor Schoenberg or his colleague Webern, but there is little doubt that it was much more accessible. Once questioned by a radio interviewer what he thought of contemporary Austrian music, that quintessential romantic Artur Rubinstein admitted that he had little conversance with the genre but did find both Wozzeck and the Violin Concerto astonishingly beautiful.
Actually, much of the music of the Second Viennese School is highly romantic, but unfamiliarity of audiences (and, more’s the pity, conductors) with the idiom and vocabulary leaves this affinity untranslatable. Of course, all three composers, products of the late 19th century, began their careers with relatively mainstream pieces of a highly emotional nature, extolling circadian and human passions (ironically, Berg less so, although any one of the Seven Early Songs could have been written by Zemlinsky). In the pantonal period, works like Schoenberg’s Erwartung or Vergangenes, are highly charged portraits of extreme emotion and what could be more romantic than Webern’s pieces evoking the Tyrolean landscapes of his youth? Berg himself sticks very close to the edge of Mahlerian sensuality, particularly in the Three Pieces for Orchestra, and even composes his own “Willow Song” for Act Three, Scene One of Wozzeck. For the twelve-tone counter-reformation (the last period through which Berg lived) we have such luminescent works as the Webern cantatas, the undeniably Brahmsian Schoenberg Piano Concerto, and, the most ravishing of all, last evening’s featured essay.
But a nostalgic look back is itself open to a retrospective glance. Gidon Kremer, the modernist’s modernist, approached the concerto as if from an advanced, future perspective. Hardly ever playing above a whisper, he spun his own interpretation of the piece as a classic in need of fresh examination. With the former period instrument conductor Harnoncourt and the unique, incestuously nurtured, sound of the insular, all-male VPO, this was the “early music” movement of the future. One is reminded of Webern the musicologist: when once asked what he thought of the works of Schoenberg and Berg, he replied, “Ah…the old masters!”. Kremer, as is his wont, distilled quite a bit of the emotion into disembodied utterances of shock and anger, certainly a legitimate interpretation of this portrait of grief, but less satisfying than the warmer phrases of, say, a Sarah Chang. At the end of the day, I had no quarrel with this soloist’s play; the orchestra, however, was lost in an unfamiliar world where they had not even the most rudimentary words and phrases of the language on which to rely. Some years ago, when James Levine decided to record a CD of 2nd Viennese music in Europe, he chose the Berlin Philharmonic, explaining that they simply did not understand the idiom of their own 20th century composers in Vienna. Little has changed.
Just as Berg’s romanticism includes a nod to the past (the Bach chorale in movement two), Anton Bruckner’s full-blown sound painting relies heavily on an evocation of the medieval world. The link between the two pieces is definitely Mahler, mentor of Berg and student of Bruckner. It was indeed Mahler who conducted the first performance of the Bruckner 4 here at Carnegie. This current Viennese rendition was VERY LOUD VERY OFTEN, the irritating yin to Mr. Kremer’s delicate yang in the concerto. Although the strings were dug in and determined to make this reading especially exciting, the poor showing of the brass colored the total experience with an unhealthy glow. I make it a point to hear the Vienna Phil every year: last evening’s performance was uncharacteristically sloppy and superficial, Classical balance, usually one of their strongest attributes, abandoned in favor of the bombastic. How many times can we hear the same exaggerated crescendo effect before it wears out its welcome?
One final thought on the Berg. At the interval, I met someone who had never heard the concerto before. She was extremely surprised to hear my description of it as romantic. Kremer’s take on the piece was interesting to those of us with some familiarity with the period and the story of Manon Gropius. But, as an introduction to the last century in Vienna, it was rather off-putting to novices. With friends like these…
Frederick L. Kirshnit
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