Orchestra plays Beethoven and Stravinsky (1st review)

The conductor Otto Klemperer said that Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms could be described in a single world: "Ravenna." By this he meant to describe a cluster of qualities— Orthodox tradition, archaic liturgy and, in general, a quality of static repose— associated with the Byzantine culture that abutted the West for a thousand years, and whose spirit seemed to inform Stravinsky's first and greatest religious work.

If one were similarly to seek a one-word description of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, "Elysium" might not unreasonably come to mind, both after the "daughters of Elysium" invoked in its choral finale and the heaven-storming nature of the music in general.

In pairing these works on the Philadelphia Orchestra's penultimate concert of the season, conductor Charles Dutoit might thus have suggested a contrast between two opposed approaches to culture or experience. Or he might simply have been giving another workout to the Philadelphia Singers Chorale, which distinguished itself in last month's Orchestra presentation of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex.

The Stravinsky work most closely associated with Beethoven is The Rite of Spring, which has often been called the Ninth Symphony of the 20th Century for its revolutionary use of rhythm and its general place in musical history as the score that most radically divides 19th- from 20th-Century musical tradition.

Michelangelo's shadow

Be that as it may, the Symphony of Psalms of 1930 might be the work in which Stravinsky had the example of Beethoven most before him. It would have been hard to write a choral symphony any time in the century or so after the Bonn master without bearing the Ninth in mind, if only because audiences were sure to do so.

Stravinsky could have called his three-movement setting of verses from Psalms 38-40 and 150 anything much he liked, but that he called it a symphony suggests a deliberate attempt to revisit the form in modern terms, as Sibelius and Schoenberg had already done. From Schubert to Mahler, Beethoven's successors had him as a daunting exemplar in much the same way that Baroque sculptors did Michelangelo.

In their very different ways, Sibelius and Schoenberg— the former in his one-movement Seventh Symphony, the latter in his two chamber symphonies— had offered instead a stripped-down model of the symphony, while Prokofiev, in his tongue-in-cheek Classical Symphony, had suggested a return to Haydnesque forms and proportions.

Power of Tilson Thomas

Stravinsky himself would hearken back more obviously to the neoclassical symphony in his Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements, but the Symphony of Psalms does resemble the "new" symphony being offered by his peers in one respect at least: concision. The Symphony of Psalms is roughly 20 minutes— one-third the length of Beethoven's Ninth. And, although its texts proceed from supplication to praise, the music conveys a classical contrast of mood rather than a Romantic sense of dramatic progression.

That said, the Symphony of Psalms is a strikingly assertive work, and conductors who see it as static and restrained undersell it. This was brought home to me some years ago in a revelatory New York performance by Michael Tilson Thomas that conveyed a full sense of the work's power to fill a hall.

Acoustics, again

Of course, good acoustics help, and when the two grand pianos at the front of the stage— a critical part of the score's texture— are barely audible to a listener in an orchestra seat, much will be lost. Verizon Hall has some days that seem better than others, or perhaps some conductors who can meet its challenges better.

The performance I attended wasn't one of them, and Dutoit, though careful with balances and nuances, neither sought nor got the big sound this work can project, and the punch it should deliver. The Symphony of Psalms doesn't set itself up to compete with Beethoven's Ninth, but on its own terms it should hold its own.

Dutoit in overdrive

As for the Ninth, its great opening movement seemed sluggishly articulated, with phrases lagging instead of crisply turned and little sense of the music's urgency. With the Scherzo, however, Dutoit went almost into overdrive, all but rushing over the tympani's critical first entries, but certainly picking up more energy.

The Adagio was carefully but feelingly shaped, with some very responsive playing from the Orchestra; and the finale— a very problematic construction— moved to a suitably grand and very crowd-pleasing close. Perhaps it's my ear, but I have heard Dutoit misfire opening movements before and only hit his stride in medias res. So it appeared to me on this occasion.

The chorus was again fine in both the Stravinsky and the Beethoven, although I would have preferred the original boys' choir Stravinsky had specified for his score in place of female singers. Among the quartet of vocal soloists, Melanie Diener's soprano stood out particularly, but Nathan Berg's bass-baritone was raw.

Once again, Orchestra patrons were led at the end of the concert into a barbaric cacophony in the Kimmel atrium, where a can-can was braying as the odious Eiffel Tower replica glittered like a giant dowager covered from head to foot in costume jewelry. The Kimmel management and the Orchestra board aren't on the best of terms these days, but one has to wonder whether they've actually declared war. Or is it just simply the terminal vulgarity of the spectacle the Kimmel seems determined to make of itself?

Debt to Judaism

A final point about the Symphony of Psalms. Stravinsky, who had only begun to return to his Orthodox roots when he composed this score, declared in the year of its composition that "the more one separates oneself from the canons of the Christian church, the further one distances oneself from the truth." This sounds more than a little like the religious pomposity T. S. Eliot expressed after turning to the Anglican church, and the not-so-genteel anti-Semitism that came with it.

But if the liturgical inflections of the music seem suitably medieval with their evocations of plainchant, let us remember that the Psalms are quintessentially Jewish. The young Leonard Bernstein clearly had this in mind when he composed his Jeremiah Symphony 12 years later; like the Symphony of Psalms, it's a setting of texts from the Hebrew Bible, but insistently Jewish in its long, plangent lines.

Stravinsky's is the greater music, but Bernstein made his point: Without Judaism there would have been no Christianity to begin with, and without due recognition of that contribution Western civilization is sapped at its root. In 1942, that was a point decidedly, not to say desperately, worth making.♦


To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.