Orchestra's "inter-war' concert (1st review)

By 1813, Beethoven had overturned the classicism of the 18th Century and ushered in a new style: Romanticism. By 1913, Stravinsky had similarly dethroned Romanticism with The Rite of Spring.

I'm exaggerating a bit, of course, but only for purposes of contrast. The year 2013 has witnessed no such transformative voice as defined the previous two centuries from very near their beginning. Perhaps one will come along, but so far our present century has been unpropitious for grand ambitions and events.

Even our wars seem merely puny and vicious. Beethoven wrote in the shadow of the Napoleonic wars, and Stravinsky (with others) soon fell under the shadow of World War I. We have Zero Dark Thirty.

Perhaps for these reasons, we remain fascinated by the century just past. This week's Philadelphia Orchestra concerts with Yannick Nézet-Séguin reflect this preoccupation, with Maurice Ravel's La Valse and the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony bookending Karol Szymanowski's Second Violin Concerto.

When empires crumbled

These three works span two critical decades in European history, from the breakup of the established empires of Central Europe to the rise of totalitarian states. In many ways they were emblematic of them— and, in the case of Shostakovich, deeply participatory.

Ravel's La Valse is a familiar showpiece that nonetheless stands alone among his works. We don't normally associate Ravel with political engagement; his dramatic or programmatic works, from Shehérazade to Daphnis et Chloe to Les Enfants et les Sortilèges, evoke, respectively, the worlds of Romantic Orientalism, Classical mythology, and childhood.

La Valse similarly references a past world: in Ravel's own words, "Eddying clouds allow glimpses of waltzing couples," and "a vast hall" of dancers is gradually revealed, that of "an imperial hall around 1855."

But something is about to go terribly amiss. The waltz tunes are disturbing, with an undertone of banality; the music lurches rather than glides; and in the end it whips up to a manic frenzy, then collapses abruptly in the last five notes. The days of the waltz are over, and, consulting the date of La Valse's composition— 1919— we realize we are hearing a threnody for the Austrian empire that had fought France in the Great War and collapsed at its end.

There's nothing chauvinistic or triumphalist in the music, though; for Ravel, Vienna's loss of its position as an imperial capital is symptomatic of a general collapse of order and culture that affects all of Europe, and foreshadows worse to come.

Poland's brief flowering

One beneficiary of Austria's collapse as well as the temporary withdrawal of another empire— that of Russia— was Poland, which was to regain the independence it had lost at the end of the 18th Century in that same year of 1919. Poland briefly flowered before a new war crushed it again, and in that interim its leading composer was the Ukrainian-born Karol Szymanowski.

Szymanowski's music is difficult to categorize; Impresssionism remained a dominant influence, but overlaid with Scriabin and Stravinsky and, increasingly, with folkloric elements. France and Russia were thus the poles of his musical heritage, as for so many interwar composers, while, like Bartok, he sought to root himself in his own national tradition.

Szymanowski's Second Violin Concerto, like his First, is a rhapsodic work in one movement in which the solo violin alternately leads the music and broods over it. It dates from 1932-33, the Decade of the Violin Concerto: Stravinsky, Berg, Schoenberg, Britten, Bloch, Barber, and Hindemith all wrote their only violin concertos between 1931 and 1939, and Prokofiev and Bartok their second ones. This is much if not most of the active 20th Century repertory for the violin, and the Szymanowski Second well belongs in this company, even though the composer himself described the score as "squeezed…. out of a desiccated tube of toothpaste [and] horribly sentimental."

I suppose we must take that as we do Brahms's jocularly disparaging remarks about his own music, for it is no such thing, but a complex and introspective work of considerable lyric authority. Violinist Leonidas Kavakos gave a haunting performance of the work, his instrument as attuned to Szymanowski's distinctive voice as if he shared the composer's very breath and thought.

Stalin's shadow

No major work, surely, has ever been composed under more adverse circumstances than Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Between 1936 and 1938, the world watched in fascinated horror as Josef Stalin systematically eliminated most of his surviving colleagues of the Bolshevik Revolution, along with the upper echelons of Russia's military, bureaucracy, and intelligentsia.

Shostakovich was an early target of the Terror. After a decade as the enfant gaté of Soviet music, he found himself in January 1936 the subject of blistering attacks in the Communist Party press, the most ominous of which accused him of playing a game with the people's music (Formalism, decadence) that would "end badly."

The composer was shunned by his erstwhile colleagues, and he kept a bag packed by his door in anticipation of a midnight call from the secret police. His political protector, the highly decorated Marshal Tukachevsky, was himself put on trial and shot immediately following his conviction.

Courageous act

It was under these circumstances that Shostakovich composed his Fifth Symphony in 1937. Even the title of the work was provocative, for Shostakovich had been forced to withdraw his Fourth Symphony from rehearsal the previous December (it wouldn't be performed until 1961). Shostakovich refused to disavow the work, however, simply leaving a gap in the numbering of his symphonies between the Third and Fifth, and an open space in his published opus numberings (the Fourth would eventually be Op. 43).

Everyone in musical Moscow knew there was or had been a mysterious Fourth, but what had become of it or even whether it had survived was a matter of conjecture until, in 1946, Shostakovich published a short score— itself an act of considerable courage, since Stalin still reigned.

The Fifth Symphony would be remarkable even as a lesser work of art; that it is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the 20th Century repertory and one of Shostakovich's greatest achievements is nothing short of astonishing.

Russians wept

Critics have pointed out that it is cast in a traditional four-movement form that follows classical symphonic dictates— a sonata-form opening movement with clearly marked and developed themes; a tripartite scherzo; a slow movement in song form; and a rondo finale built on a march. All this has been interpreted as a concession, if not a capitulation to Stalinist musical orthodoxy. But any responsible hearing of the score makes nonsense of this assertion.

The Fifth is a work of uncompromising integrity, and if its musical language is less problematic than that of the aggressively Modernist Fourth, it is just as fair to suggest that Shostakovich wanted to make a statement that would be immediately accessible to his Moscow public as pleasing to the musical apparatchiks.

Certainly the brutal marches that characterize the first, second, and fourth movements, and the impassioned lament of the third, could brook no misinterpretation from his Moscow public— the intelligentsia whose ranks were being decimated at that very moment.. The audience at the premiere on November 21, 1937 wept openly during the Largo and gave the work a 30-minute ovation at the end. A great artist had spoken directly to his fellow countrymen in one of the most terrible moments of their history, at the gravest risk to himself.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia….

The authorities weren't pleased, but such was the popular reaction to the score that they had to agree that the composer had "rehabilitated" himself. Stalin would find a more opportune moment to strike later.

Three-quarters of a century later, we cannot hear the Fifth as its Russian audiences did when it was new; it is more generically tragic for us, and must be approached on more strictly musical terms.

Nézet-Séguin, who produced a couple of exaggerated ritards in La Valse, took the savage march of the Shostakovich finale at such a fast clip that the Orchestra at one point seemed to trip over it. This listener had a couple of other quibbles with the opening Moderato, but in general this was an impressive and compelling performance, with the Largo in particular producing ravishing sound in the divided strings, and the ensemble as a whole projecting deep emotional intensity.

And after the overly fast start in the finale, one was grateful that the final peroration was given room to breathe and amplitude for the hammer blows at the end to make their full impact. (Leonard Bernstein ruined his famous performance of the score here.)

To be sure, the Philadelphia audience did not applaud for a half-hour, but it did leap to its feet for an ovation, while directly behind me a young music student whooped with glee. Amid the gray heads of the customary Orchestra audience, that was a glad sound to hear.♦


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