Philadelphia Orchestra unveils two premieres

It also represents a vicious cycle. Audiences left unfamiliar with the work of their time tend to regard it as not worth hearing, and the old masterpieces they’re fed lead not to the future but only back into the past. The result is a closed museum.

It was not always so. Although new music has always been resisted — Brahms was still regarded as an avant-garde composer by some in the 1920s — it always found a way, and the same audiences that rioted against Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 applauded it the next year. Leopold Stokowski insistently programmed modern works with the Philadelphia Orchestra during his tenure from 1912 to 1936, and Eugene Ormandy (1936-80), his stodgy reputation notwithstanding, did so too. Only in the past half-century has new music has found the repertory gates locked.

Vicious cycle

Some orchestras still commission new work, or maintain composers in residence for a season or two. It’s a token acknowledgment that new music is actually being written. But commissioned works, once performed, are almost invariably laid aside; and resident composers, like mascots, travel only with the team. It’s a long time since a new composer crossed international frontiers the way Strauss and Stravinsky or Prokofiev and Shostakovich once did.

One result of this is the musical eclecticism so characteristic of our time. The forceful lead once given by a Stravinsky, a Schoenberg, a Bartok, may still be available through studying scores or hearing streamed or recorded sound but seldom through live performances by major orchestras. Anything goes, in effect, because nothing sets the pace. And that, too, is a vicious cycle, because it suggests that new music really has nothing new to say.

This quandary lacks a simple answer, but this past weekend the Philadelphia Orchestra did something rarely seen these days by a major band: It programmed two substantial, commissioned works for the same concert, Maurice Wright’s Resounding Drums, a concerto for tympani and orchestra, and Jonathan Leshnoff’s Clarinet Concerto.

Siege of Vienna

Orchestras often give lip service to contemporary music by putting a ten- or 15-minute piece at the head of a program, which in effect says to an audience: Let’s get that out of the way, and get back to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. But the concertos on this program each came in at just a tad under 25 minutes, comprising the bulk of the concert. Nor was the rest of the program, although by popular composers, merely standard fare.

Maurice Wright was born in Virginia and now lives outside Philadelphia in Wyncote. Percussion has featured extensively in his work, and in writing his concerto he has gone back to the odd manner by which pitched drums were introduced into Western music, namely their abandonment by Ottoman Janissaries retreating from the siege of Vienna in 1529. Wright weaves various pictorial elements and musical quotations into his long central movement to evoke that long-ago battle. The siege of Vienna doesn’t get much press these days, but suffice it to say that, had the Ottomans prevailed in 1529 (or when they besieged Vienna again in 1683), the world might be a significantly different place.

Wright marshals his orchestral firepower for this scenic tapestry; the outer movements are, respectively, meditative and dancelike. The notion of drums dancing or meditating sounds a bit of a stretch, but not in the hands of the Orchestra’s principal timpanist Don Liuzzi, for whom the work was written, and who performed it brilliantly.

Like Hebrew song

Percussion concertos aren’t abundant in the orchestral repertory, but the modern clarinet doesn’t fare terribly much better. Only the Nielsen and Copland concertos are regularly performed, while those of Gerald Finzi and John Corigliano arguably should be. Jonathan Leshnoff’s new concerto, even on a first hearing, is a work that should win its own place.

It is frankly lyrical in its outer movements in a neo-Romantic vein, and so gratefully written for the clarinet that Ricardo Morales seemed rather to be speaking than performing it. The fast middle movement tests the soloist rhythmically, but there is nothing in the idiom that would be problematic in, say, a Samuel Barber concerto.

That is not meant to damn with faint praise. We are no longer obliged, happily, to judge new music by its rebarbativeness or complexity, and, though Leshnoff has his own compositional schema in mind— based on the vowel indications of the Hebrew alphabet— the result was song. And Morales, for whom this piece, too, was written, was magnificent.

American optimism, Russian persistence

Leonard Bernstein’s overture to Candide is a popular curtain raiser, but Yannick Nézet-Séguin got the same bounce out of Bernstein’s Three Dance Variations from the 1944 Jerome Robbins ballet, Fancy Free. You can hear Gershwin, Copland, and Stravinsky in the jazz and Latin-inflected score, but it is all echt Lenny. A war was going on then and memories of the Great Depression were still vivid, but the generous and irrepressible optimism that runs though this music continues to remind us of a time when America was convinced of its destiny and eager to share (or impose) it. The Orchestra romped through the score.

Sergei Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, last up on the program, was composed in Stalin’s final, paranoid days, when Soviet musicians were under orders to write down for the masses. When Stalinist repression passed at last with the dictator’s death, Shostakovich unveiled works he’d kept in his drawer while writing potboilers for Stalin. Prokofiev apparently harbored no similarly hidden trove, but he produced estimable work — the Cello Sonata, Op. 119, the Symphony Concertante, Op. 125, and this symphony, his last completed composition — even under constraint. Prokofiev never lived to see the Soviet Thaw, since he died with Stalin himself on March 5, 1953.

His Seventh Symphony is full of wonderful melody, scintillating orchestration, and generally high spirits. Nézet-Séguin looked out hints of tragedy in it, and his interpretation did bring elements of gravity to the fore. He finished the work without the Haydnesque false ending usually performed with the Seventh, and arguably a reference to Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony. But tragedy was not Prokofiev’s forte, pace his Romeo and Juliet. If Shostakovich was Russia’s Hamlet, Prokofiev is its Falstaff. Which is not a bad role to play.