Curtis Symphony at the Kimmel (1st review)

The Pathétique was seen not only as a final but a farewell work, in which Tchaikovsky depicted his approaching end and provided his own musical epitaph. This approach was given color by the then-novel device of finishing the symphony with a profoundly doleful Adagio lamentoso. Tchaikovsky himself remarked of the work that it contained “a program that will be an enigma to all.” A legend grew up that he had committed suicide after being condemned by an aristocratic honor court. This was rubbish, but the story persisted, and the Pathétique remains indelibly associated with the composer’s untimely end.

Can we not hear the Pathétique simply as a symphonic composition in four movements without extra-musical connotations of any kind? Does it matter whether Tchaikovsky had a program in mind? Would it matter if he had spelled it out?

Stravinsky’s reaction

Igor Stravinsky, whose Fireworks opened the concert, asserted that music was incapable of expressing anything but itself, no matter what the composer’s personal intention might be. Stravinsky wrote a great deal of music meant to accompany dramatic actions and texts, so he was no pure formalist. His point was that music might enable or enhance some other art, but it could not actually signify anything but itself; its language was strictly tautological.

Stravinsky wasn’t simply musing about the nature of music. He reacted against 19th-century Romanticism, in particular its cult of extramusical expressiveness. The Pathétique, wittingly or not, was the apotheosis of this trend. The very withholding of the composer’s program encouraged audience fantasy; the circumstances of his sudden death made that fantasy morbid. Stravinsky’s own early Symphony in E-flat was in fact heavily indebted to Tchaikovsky, and he continued to admire Tchaikovsky’s ballets. But Stravinsky refused to wear his heart on his sleeve and did his best to conceal the one in his chest.

Echoes of John Cage

These musings are particularly significant in terms of the middle work on the Curtis program, the Philadelphia premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Concerto doppio for Violin, Viola, and Orchestra (2012).

Penderecki first came to international attention more than half a century ago with his Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, a compact, powerful work for string orchestra that would perhaps have attracted less attention under its original, John Cagean title of 8’37”. The difference prefigured the course of his career and that of much of Western art music since. Penderecki came of age in the determinedly experimental 1950s, and he summed up his aesthetic at the time with a pithy comment: “All I’m interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.”

Penderecki soon changed his mind, however. He became interested in Baroque forms in the 1960s, and his musical language evolved in the direction of what would soon be called neo-Romanticism. Tradition had turned out not to be such a bad thing after all. The Concerto doppio, a 20-minute, single-movement work, combines Baroque elements with a Romantic sensibility, clothed to be sure in a modernist idiom but speaking with an emotional directness that Tchaikovsky might have approved.

There’s a difference between work that sounds derivative or warmed over and work that extends and explores tradition. The Concerto doppio belongs to the latter category. Soloists Benjamin Schmid and Roberto Díaz worked their frequently interwoven lines into a deeply satisfying dialogue, and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn led the Curtis Symphony’s accompaniment with precision and élan.

Solzhenitsyn falls short

Stravinsky’s Fireworks, led by Kensho Watanabe and likewise well played, is an early, transitional work that offers a foretaste of the orchestral mastery he was soon to display in The Firebird. One catches hints of Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, and Glière in the music— in fact, everyone but Stravinsky. And yet this young man is clearly on his way.

As for the Tchaikovsky, Solzhenitsyn drew a robust if not entirely polished performance from the Curtis Orchestra, with some ragged edges in the brass. The strings couldn’t emulate the plush sound of Philadelphia’s senior orchestra, but they were well integrated. The wind choir played best.

Solzhenitsyn took a broad view of the score but didn’t produce a fully convincing account. The audience burst into applause after the brilliant climax of the third movement, as audiences always do. If the Pathétique had ended there, it would have a very different and more nearly triumphal character. But the concluding Adagio is what stamps the work, throwing its shadow over the other movements and foreshadowing the long, slow movements that conclude some of the Mahler symphonies, particularly the Ninth.

Silence greeted its last, dying notes, as again always happens. There is no effect in music quite like it, as if the audience had been deliberately wrought to a pitch of fevered enthusiasm by the preceding Allegro only to be sobered by a vision of tragic despair.

You couldn’t get away with that in any art but music. What did Tchaikovsky mean by it? Only the music can say.

For another review of this concert by Tom Purdom, click here.