Jurowski conducts Bach, Strauss, and Mahler

Jurowski opened his program with a suite and concluded with a tone poem, with two works for piano and orchestra in between. Both the suite and the concerto were by Bach. His Suite No. 2 is a soloistic work itself, with a flute pitted against a string orchestra and continuo; it’s actually Bach’s last purely instrumental composition, despite a “third” Orchestral Suite in G and a “fourth” in D. Jeffrey Khaner, the Orchestra’s principal flutist, did the honors, and Jurowski conducted from the clavichord. This latter touch accentuated Verizon Hall’s unresolved acoustical issues, since Jurowski’s playing could be seen but not heard, except for a passage where the strings stopped and he and Khaner played a duet.

Precocious Strauss

Emanuel Ax concluded the first half of the program with Richard Strauss’ Burleske for Piano and Orchestra, last heard from the Orchestra with Ax as soloist and Wolfgang Sawallisch on the podium in 1996. Although it was composed in 1885-86 when Strauss was just 21, it’s an astonishingly precocious work whose first chords look forward to the coming century and whose pianistic demands rival those of Liszt. Indeed, if Strauss had called his one-movement sonata form work by the more serious title of “concerto” — as Liszt did with his similarly organized Concerto in E-flat — it might be more of a repertory work.

Ax played with the sense of discovery that only the best of pianists can find in a work they’ve long championed, and Strauss’s brilliantly inventive scoring revealed the full scope of his orchestral mastery for the first time. Particularly telling were the dialogues between Ax and principal timpanist Don Liuzzi, another touch that anticipated the modern utilization of the piano as a percussion instrument. Strauss himself apparently disparaged this work in light of his tone poems that followed, and he would not compose again for piano and orchestra for 40 years.

Colleagues and rivals, too

Ax returned after intermission with what the program billed as Bach’s “Piano Concerto No. 1.” Of course, it is a work for clavier, and period-instrument performances play it that way; but it accommodates the Romantic piano very well with the striding, spacious themes of the opening and closing Allegros and the deep poetry of the Adagio. In feeling if not texture, it seems to vault forward toward the minor key concertos of Mozart, if not beyond; but then, Bach is always the composer of the future. What remains firmly rooted in the Baroque is the continuous clavier line, so that the performer must manage as many notes in this 20-minute work as in a Romantic concerto twice its length and virtually without pause. As in the Strauss Burleske, Ax was lucid and elegant, but with brio and reflection as the occasion demanded.

Strauss and Mahler were colleagues and rivals, and, as the enfants terrible of the new musical age of the 1880s and 1890s, they offer a study in contrasts. Both were preoccupied with the notion of the artist as hero, and both applied that prototype to themselves: Strauss in a comic mode and Mahler in a tragic one.

Mahler would declare to Sibelius that a symphony should seek to encompass the whole world, but in his case it was a world reflected through the artist’s own ego and personal struggle, and thus we take his symphonic corpus as an extended self-portrait. At first, he tended to attach programs to his symphonies, although he later discarded them. The First Symphony, as we know, was originally intended to depict the progress of a hero’s life; it ends in a burst of triumphant affirmation, but it’s also abruptly cut off in the final two notes.

Hero’s burial

From that work, Mahler almost immediately proceeded to compose a tone poem as an extended coda. He called it Todtenfeier – Funeral Rite or, as it may also be translated, Festivity, the entombment and celebration of the hero. At the same time, however, Mahler had also embarked on his Second Symphony, The Resurrection. Todtenfeier would ultimately become this symphony’s first movement, and thus not a pendant to the drama of the First Symphony but the beginning of a new journey that would bring its hero to a grand apotheosis.

Mahler still regarded Todtenfeier as an independent work, however. He performed it in 1896, two years after completing The Resurrection Symphony, in a concert with the First Symphony, thus indicating that the two scores remained linked in his mind. He further specified that a five-minute break be observed after the first movement in performances of The Resurrection. This is no longer done, and the tone poem has effectively disappeared into the symphony.

This would be a point of merely musicological interest, but Todtenfeier is not simply identical to the Allegro maestoso of the Second Symphony, nor can it be regarded merely as a discarded first draft. It’s a longer work and, particularly in its second half, one different in tone, feeling, and orchestration — in short, a composition on its own. Lately Todtenfeier has been recorded as such, but it’s still an extreme concert rarity, and Jurowski’s vigorous performance was its first ever with the Philadelphia Orchestra. As such, it was fascinating to hear.

Last year, Sir Simon Rattle ran the Sibelius Sixth and Seventh Symphonies together as if they were a single work in an Orchestra concert; there was no warrant for that, but a performance of the Mahler First and Second Symphonies with the original Todtenfeier as a bridge between them would be an interesting — and far more biographically credible — experiment. You’d have to be prepared to hear a lot of music, though.