on beyond Mahler

[calimac]

The mystery is: so long as the world still contains great hymns to wholeness like Brahms's First Symphony, what need is there for noisy disintegrated crap like Alban Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra? The San Francisco Symphony played both last night, and one could only surmise that Berg, who wrote his work in 1915, had been driven mad by a century of uninterrupted Romantic music. Mahler's fractured compositions, which jump around hysterically, trying futilely to evoke emotions that they've done nothing to prepare for or to earn, were bad enough, and Berg tried to take up where Mahler left off. The thematic patterns described by the program notes were undiscernible by the casual ear, and I think by this time I have a fairly experienced ear. MTT, speaking before he conducted it, said he found it fascinating, but he's been studying the score. Augenmusik at its purest. Fortunately unlike Mahler, Berg was fairly short-winded. Despite its (lack of) length, this wad of loud crumbling sticky mess is a perfect example of the heat-death, or possibly the gas giant, phase of post-romanticism. It's trying to proclaim that nothing could possibly come after it. In the event, history offered a choice between the cool austerity of neo-classicism, and the tiny purity of strict serialism, vitamin pills instead of music.

But the Brahms was very fine. Instead of a massive edifice of sound, this was balanced choruses of instruments responding to each other. No heavy imposition on the grand moments, even the grand "Ode to Joy"-like theme in the finale curled up in a gentle wisp of melody. Naturally with this approach, the pastoral middle movements were even more appealing. Brahms created a beautiful thing.

For a rarity, pre-concert I dined with others at a real restaurant, rather than my usual hasty SFS-night fare of a Korean rice bowl or a Mission District burrito. My food was as puzzling as an Alban Berg composition. It was supposed to be seafood chowder, but it had not a trace of liquid nor of cream. A heap of shellfish (mostly mussels, ehh) on top of a layer of pollock, in turn on a layer of pulverized potato mush. It wasn't bad, exactly, but not what I was expecting at all. I'd expected I'd be sorry I had a big lunch (the dinner wasn't planned until the afternoon), but instead I was glad of it.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that's always true, or at least if it is, the ratio on which the likeliness rises is not that high. Not often does SFS play something quite this appalling.

But the reverse does seem to be true: the obscurer the ensemble, the more likely they are likely to play something you adore in recording but had given up hope of ever hearing performed live.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

I grant you permission to refer to that as Calimac's Corollary to Lynch's First Law.