Chamber arrangements of full symphonies

Today, a good transcription can give us a new look at a familiar piece. Sometimes, it can even transform a piece into something that seems like a complete novelty. The Chamber Orchestra’s performance of Erwin Stein’s arrangement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was so compelling it made me wish I could wrap it up and send it to everybody I knew.

The Fourth is Mahler’s most familiar symphony. It’s shorter than his other works, and it calls for a single vocalist rather than the big choruses he added to his more grandiose efforts. Stein reduced its forces to 12 musicians — strings, woodwinds, percussion, harmonium, and piano.

You could hear the difference from the first notes. The purity of one-to-a-part playing meant that you could hear (and see) what every section of the orchestra was doing at every moment. The first movement acquired a lightness and jocularity that tied it directly to the childish lightness of the boy’s vision of heaven, sung by the soprano, which closes the symphony with boyish images of fishing and food.

Mahler crowded the stage with massive orchestras, but he didn’t hire all those musicians merely because he wanted to make a big noise. His big orchestras are a giant paintbox, packed with colors he combines in effects that can be surprisingly delicate and lovely. A chamber arrangement preserves the effects and enhances them with the clarity and intensity of chamber playing. In a symphony version, you focus on a whole section when the score calls your attention to the cellos or the winds. In a chamber version, you focus on the bravura of a single musician or the ring of a single flute, and you can hear all the individual instruments that are playing with it.

Soprano Chloé Olivia Moore had to replace the scheduled Haeran Hong. Like most substitutes these days, she provided more evidence that contemporary musical organizations work with a deep bench. The soprano song at the end of the symphony doesn’t last long but it’s critical, and she delivered all the flowing lines and jaunty good humor it requires.

The shock of the new

This was the first Chamber Orchestra performance of the Mahler Fourth, and I believe it’s only the second time the chamber version has been performed in Philadelphia in the last couple of decades; Orchestra 2001 performed it about 15 years ago. The Orion Quartet presented a similar novelty, coincidentally, when it joined pianist Peter Serkin in another chamber transcription on the same weekend. This seems to have been the first time a Philadelphia Chamber Music Society program has presented Anton Webern’s transcription of Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie.

The literature for piano and string quartet includes some of the most popular works in the chamber repertoire, and Webern’s arrangement ranks with the best of them. If you like big, passionate music for piano and strings — and who doesn’t? — it’s an irresistible example of the genre, played nonstop, almost full blast, from beginning to end. Webern was a gifted arranger, and he produced a piece that’s packed with moments for all five instruments. A single two-minute span can include a violin solo, a cello solo, and an interlude in which the pianist’s hands hop across the center of the keyboard like a flock of hyperactive birds.

Both of these pieces appeared on programs with works that we normally hear in the versions the musicians performed. The Chamber Orchestra prefaced the Mahler with a moving performance of Schoenberg’s string orchestra masterpiece, Transfigured Night. The Orion Quartet concert included two of Haydn’s most engaging quartets and a sadly sweet 1914 piano quartet by Max Reger. The two transcriptions slipped into the lineup without any indication they were intruders. Smaller may not be better, but it can be just as good, and it has virtues all its own.

For Victor L. Schermer’s review of the Peter Serkin and Orion Quartet concert, click here.