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Orchestra plays Sibelius and Bruckner
Robert Zaller
Eschenbach in the homestretch
ROBERT ZALLER
Folded into my program of Christoph Eschenbach’s performances of the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony was a pamphlet marking performance highlights of his five-year tenure as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s seventh music director. There was plenty of good music-making to remember. Remind me again why Eschenbach is leaving in favor of an interim appointee who’s neither a younger nor a better musician, and who will wield less authority to shape the future of the city’s premier cultural institution.
While you’re thinking about that, Eschenbach will be going out with some big symphonic statements, the Bruckner among them. Bruckner was the first composer to devote himself principally to the symphony, to be followed by Mahler and Sibelius. These founders of the late Romantic symphony were followed by the 20th-Century trio of Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, while the more modernist camp defined itself against the symphony. Blame it on Beethoven, I suppose, since after his mighty nine, composers were forever trying to either live up to his example or escape his shadow.
The seven symphonies of Sibelius are the cornerstone of his achievement, as I suppose no one would deny. But unlike Bruckner and Mahler, Sibelius wrote a good deal of other music as well: tone poems, theater music, songs and, of course, the first great violin concerto of the 20th Century. Some might say it is the century’s great fiddle concerto, and it’s an arguable proposition at least.
Sibelius wrote a first version in 1903, disliked it, and rewrote it two years later. A few years ago, someone dug up the original version and recorded it. It makes for an instructive comparison at any rate. The familiar version, like all top-drawer Sibelius, conveys a sense of sweep and inevitability. The discarded version sounds as if the score had been held under water. The thematic material is there, but it wanders interminably and to no particular purpose. Its chief value is to remind us how hard it is to get things right the first time, and, especially, how hard it was for Sibelius. No wonder that Eighth Symphony never got finished.
A firm tone, and yet…
The Siberian-born Vadim Repin was the soloist for these concerts. Repin is a world-class musician. He has a firm, fine, aristocratic tone, and there is absolutely nothing he cannot do technically with his instrument, as his encore performance of Paganini amply demonstrated. The rapid scalar passages in the Sibelius were equally impressive.
What I missed, though, was the rhapsodic quality that can really make this work catch fire. While I thoroughly admired all that Repin did (as did Eschenbach, who beamed at him during his cadenzas), I could not help but think of what Repin’s fellow countryman David Oistrakh used to do with the score. It seems ungrateful to complain about loveliness, but sometimes more is called for.
Like watching icebergs calve
Bruckner, like Sibelius, was an inveterate reviser, and he too achieves at his best a granitic inevitability that’s almost impossible to resolve into its disparate details. Listening to a Bruckner symphony is like watching icebergs calve, with great panels of sound grinding and sliding past each other. The Sixth Symphony offers an astonishing abundance of material, but little in the way of conventional development: It is as if Bruckner wants to begin again and again— a process of continual revision rather than of composition. The music will surge up on a fanfare, then simply stop as another idea supervenes.
This could be maddening, and it’s almost impossible to state how it can be coherent. Yet somehow a great musical intelligence shapes this work, led on by a vision the music itself can hardly express. It is moving, certainly, earthy and celestial by turns, and although nothing in particular seems to add up, the whole is unmistakably there.
The heart of the Bruckner Sixth is its slow movement, and Eschenbach and the Orchestra played it ravishingly and with deep conviction. Indeed, the conductor and his forces seemed so much in unison that it was hard to imagine what differences could ever have separated them. Like a couple that has finally agreed on a difficult divorce, they appear to have found a kind of serenity that their first vows had hardly promised. Go figure.
ROBERT ZALLER
Folded into my program of Christoph Eschenbach’s performances of the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony was a pamphlet marking performance highlights of his five-year tenure as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s seventh music director. There was plenty of good music-making to remember. Remind me again why Eschenbach is leaving in favor of an interim appointee who’s neither a younger nor a better musician, and who will wield less authority to shape the future of the city’s premier cultural institution.
While you’re thinking about that, Eschenbach will be going out with some big symphonic statements, the Bruckner among them. Bruckner was the first composer to devote himself principally to the symphony, to be followed by Mahler and Sibelius. These founders of the late Romantic symphony were followed by the 20th-Century trio of Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, while the more modernist camp defined itself against the symphony. Blame it on Beethoven, I suppose, since after his mighty nine, composers were forever trying to either live up to his example or escape his shadow.
The seven symphonies of Sibelius are the cornerstone of his achievement, as I suppose no one would deny. But unlike Bruckner and Mahler, Sibelius wrote a good deal of other music as well: tone poems, theater music, songs and, of course, the first great violin concerto of the 20th Century. Some might say it is the century’s great fiddle concerto, and it’s an arguable proposition at least.
Sibelius wrote a first version in 1903, disliked it, and rewrote it two years later. A few years ago, someone dug up the original version and recorded it. It makes for an instructive comparison at any rate. The familiar version, like all top-drawer Sibelius, conveys a sense of sweep and inevitability. The discarded version sounds as if the score had been held under water. The thematic material is there, but it wanders interminably and to no particular purpose. Its chief value is to remind us how hard it is to get things right the first time, and, especially, how hard it was for Sibelius. No wonder that Eighth Symphony never got finished.
A firm tone, and yet…
The Siberian-born Vadim Repin was the soloist for these concerts. Repin is a world-class musician. He has a firm, fine, aristocratic tone, and there is absolutely nothing he cannot do technically with his instrument, as his encore performance of Paganini amply demonstrated. The rapid scalar passages in the Sibelius were equally impressive.
What I missed, though, was the rhapsodic quality that can really make this work catch fire. While I thoroughly admired all that Repin did (as did Eschenbach, who beamed at him during his cadenzas), I could not help but think of what Repin’s fellow countryman David Oistrakh used to do with the score. It seems ungrateful to complain about loveliness, but sometimes more is called for.
Like watching icebergs calve
Bruckner, like Sibelius, was an inveterate reviser, and he too achieves at his best a granitic inevitability that’s almost impossible to resolve into its disparate details. Listening to a Bruckner symphony is like watching icebergs calve, with great panels of sound grinding and sliding past each other. The Sixth Symphony offers an astonishing abundance of material, but little in the way of conventional development: It is as if Bruckner wants to begin again and again— a process of continual revision rather than of composition. The music will surge up on a fanfare, then simply stop as another idea supervenes.
This could be maddening, and it’s almost impossible to state how it can be coherent. Yet somehow a great musical intelligence shapes this work, led on by a vision the music itself can hardly express. It is moving, certainly, earthy and celestial by turns, and although nothing in particular seems to add up, the whole is unmistakably there.
The heart of the Bruckner Sixth is its slow movement, and Eschenbach and the Orchestra played it ravishingly and with deep conviction. Indeed, the conductor and his forces seemed so much in unison that it was hard to imagine what differences could ever have separated them. Like a couple that has finally agreed on a difficult divorce, they appear to have found a kind of serenity that their first vows had hardly promised. Go figure.
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