Higdon, Bernstein and the Orchestra (2nd review)

Good (but muddled) intentions, or:
How is Jennifer Higdon like Leonard Bernstein?

STEVE COHEN

Sometimes a composer doesn’t get what he or she plans. Two instances of that emerged at last weekend’s concerts by the Philadelphia Orchestra. (I attended on Saturday night, after Robert Zaller wrote his appraisal of Friday’s concert.)

When a composer winds up with something different from what was planned it isn’t necessarily a bad thing; but it is curious. Jennifer Higdon started to write a violin concerto but finished a piece in which a chorus dominates and the violin adds flourishes and obbligatos. Jennifer Koh’s playing is expert and I don’t criticize her contribution; I’m just bemused by its subordination.

Higdon’s The Singing Rooms is pleasant-sounding, rather ethereal. Jeanne Minahan’s poems served the purpose of inspiring Higdon to sonically explore the rooms, or stages, of life, but they didn’t move me. Of the audible words– the diction of the Philadelphia Singers wasn’t clear– many sounded ambiguous. What, for example, do you make of "Musicians on a whim, break our hearts, lovers take the blame"?

On the other hand, Minahan created some vivid imagery: "How brief the pause/ between despair and comfort...How small the space/ between window and frame."

I disagree with Robert’s prediction that this piece will land in the permanent repertory. Its impractical size alone, with a large chorus, mitigates against frequent performances. In any case, The Singing Rooms just isn’t sufficiently gripping.

Bernstein and the politics of the ’40s

The program also included Leonard Bernstein’s first symphony, titled Jeremiah. Bernstein wrote a program and a text for the last movement, using the words of the Biblical prophet. It’s a strong composition with many emotional moments. But if you didn’t read Lenny’s comments on the second movement, you could easily mistake some of his intentions. Listen abstractly and you hear, in part of that, a playful scherzo rather than the people’s rejection of Jeremiah. You’ll also hear a Latin beat that sounds like the “Dance in the Gym” from West Side Story, which dealt not with the children of Israel but with Puerto Rican immigrants in New York.

To be sure, in 1942, when he started to write the Jeremiah, Bernstein belonged to a generation obsessed with South America, where the Allies and the Nazis were competing for hearts and minds. President Roosevelt proclaimed a Good Neighbor policy; Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue was renamed the Avenue of the Americas; Toscanini and Stokowski took their U.S. orchestras on South American tours; and Walt Disney and Orson Welles followed. Morton Gould and other symphonists wrote Latin American pieces. And the 24-year-old Lenny put this flavor into his first symphony.

Then he added ferocity and dissonance reminiscent of Le Sacre du Printemps. Cross-rhythms and clashing textures do appropriately indicate the reception that Jeremiah’s prophecies received. But Bernstein’s original intention was even more far afield. "I subtitled it ‘War Between the Gypsies and the Russians’,” he told Humphrey Burton in 1984, “because I wanted to write Russian music. What came out, who knows?"

The Nazis and the sins of the Israelites

Multiple motives and subtexts abound in Jeremiah, the most wrenching of which relates to Bernstein’s Jewish identification. On the surface, he’s writing about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem— caused, Jeremiah said, by the sins of the Israelites. But Lenny must have been thinking, too, of the persecution of European Jewry by the Nazis, which no sane person would say was caused by the sins of any Jews. When he started the composition, Americans didn’t yet know of Hitler’s systematic plan to kill all the Jews. But Bernstein and others were surely aware that the Jewish civilization of Europe was being destroyed.

Christoph Eschenbach conducted with a convincing understanding of the Bernstein style and also with empathy (he lost members of his own family at the hands of the Nazis). Rinat Shaham sang the lamentation beautifully and with obvious understanding of Hebrew. Her voice has gained size and richness even beyond the beautiful lyric mezzo singing that we admired during her student days at Curtis.

Eschenbach, without the pressure

The choice of Robert Schumann’s Second Symphony to conclude this program seemed surprising at first glance, but that piece was a daring, forward-looking composition in its time. Schumann took the framework of classical symphony used by his contemporaries Schubert and Mendelssohn and expanded it with lyrical and dramatic digressions that hinted at the romanticism of later tone poems.

It was a pleasure to enjoy Schumann’s unhurried exploration of fresh ideas. Eschenbach did a fine job with this piece— more exciting than Sawallisch at the close of his tenure in Philadelphia. The second violins were seated to the conductor’s right, which accentuated the contrasting contributions of the two fiddle groups. Are Eschenbach and the Orchestra getting accustomed to each other now that the pressure is off? At any rate, their collaboration Saturday night sounded congenial.


To read another review of this concert by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.