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concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley
Jun. 8th, 2008 08:53 amLast night's program was an importation of a Chicago music education project called "Beyond the Score." This is basically a scheme to cut the concert in half by substituting for the first half an elaborate pre-concert lecture on the work being given in the second half, which in this case was Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
I wouldn't mind this if the lecture portion is good enough. This wasn't. It followed the all-too-common Stephen Ambrose/David McCullough pattern of using extensive research and (as far as I could tell) careful accuracy in the service of a relentlessly superficial and selective view of the subject. Defenders will no doubt say that this was because it was intended for an audience of everyday concert-goers, but there's a difference between accessibility to non-experts and superficiality. If you want an example of the former without the latter, see if you can find a copy of Robert Winter's Multimedia Stravinsky CD-ROM presentation of the Rite from Voyager/Microsoft. (Or his Beethoven Ninth in the same series.)
What we had here was two narrators (one reading the script, the other adopting various odd accents to read quotations) talking us through the plot of the Rite from the point of view of it as an anthropological re-creation of a hypothesized ancient Russian ritual. Musical illustrations were provided by early 20C field recordings (most of which sounded as much Amerind as anything else), by a third presenter who played Russian folk instruments, and oh yes by the orchestra, seated in their massed glory behind the presenters but mostly wasting their time just sitting there. Photos were projected on a back screen.
Certainly the anthropological view is one important aspect of studying the Rite, and the juxtapositions of the Russian folk music source material with Stravinsky's transformations was interesting, but to my ears the most striking thing is not how similar his work is to his sources, but in how much he transformed them. As I've learned from reading way too many source studies of Tolkien, the problem with focusing too much on identifying sources is that it trivializes, rather than enhances, the standing of the result. Art consists not of a patchwork of source materials, but in what the artist does with them. And here the program was sadly deficient. There were a couple good moments of musical analysis, bringing out the interior of the score by having one or some instruments play their parts for a few bars and then doing the same chunk with full orchestra, but vague references to Stravinsky's complex rhythms and one quick cryptic look at a sheet of his sketches - look, he plays bars labeled A, B, C, D, and E in that order! - are no substitute for an explanation of his truly revolutionary modular rhythmic construction, which more than anything else is what made the Rite the cornerstone of the next fifty years of classical music. (Winter is very good on this.)
And was there anything about its reception and subsequent influence? No. Nothing about the musical context - how this stark primitivism evolved from the lush late-Romantic Orientalism Stravinsky learned from Rimsky-Korsakov, or about other composers like Prokofiev or Bartok who were discovering archaeological primitivism at the same time. And though a few (not many, and they were not identified as such) of the photos came from the first production, unless I nodded off - which I may well have - there was nothing about the Rite as a ballet apart from the plot summary, and the names Diaghilev and Nijinsky were not even mentioned. I don't know how you can talk about this work without them.
The performance after intermission, under Martin West, didn't lack vigor, but it seemed a light, chipper, melodic rendition without the kind of impact the multi-media presentation had been preparing us for. No feeling of dinosaurs lumbering across the landscape, whoops wrong multi-media presentation. I felt a little underwhelmed, and my strongest feelings of the evening were reserved for the parking garage employee who refused to believe that the elevator was broken.
I wouldn't mind this if the lecture portion is good enough. This wasn't. It followed the all-too-common Stephen Ambrose/David McCullough pattern of using extensive research and (as far as I could tell) careful accuracy in the service of a relentlessly superficial and selective view of the subject. Defenders will no doubt say that this was because it was intended for an audience of everyday concert-goers, but there's a difference between accessibility to non-experts and superficiality. If you want an example of the former without the latter, see if you can find a copy of Robert Winter's Multimedia Stravinsky CD-ROM presentation of the Rite from Voyager/Microsoft. (Or his Beethoven Ninth in the same series.)
What we had here was two narrators (one reading the script, the other adopting various odd accents to read quotations) talking us through the plot of the Rite from the point of view of it as an anthropological re-creation of a hypothesized ancient Russian ritual. Musical illustrations were provided by early 20C field recordings (most of which sounded as much Amerind as anything else), by a third presenter who played Russian folk instruments, and oh yes by the orchestra, seated in their massed glory behind the presenters but mostly wasting their time just sitting there. Photos were projected on a back screen.
Certainly the anthropological view is one important aspect of studying the Rite, and the juxtapositions of the Russian folk music source material with Stravinsky's transformations was interesting, but to my ears the most striking thing is not how similar his work is to his sources, but in how much he transformed them. As I've learned from reading way too many source studies of Tolkien, the problem with focusing too much on identifying sources is that it trivializes, rather than enhances, the standing of the result. Art consists not of a patchwork of source materials, but in what the artist does with them. And here the program was sadly deficient. There were a couple good moments of musical analysis, bringing out the interior of the score by having one or some instruments play their parts for a few bars and then doing the same chunk with full orchestra, but vague references to Stravinsky's complex rhythms and one quick cryptic look at a sheet of his sketches - look, he plays bars labeled A, B, C, D, and E in that order! - are no substitute for an explanation of his truly revolutionary modular rhythmic construction, which more than anything else is what made the Rite the cornerstone of the next fifty years of classical music. (Winter is very good on this.)
And was there anything about its reception and subsequent influence? No. Nothing about the musical context - how this stark primitivism evolved from the lush late-Romantic Orientalism Stravinsky learned from Rimsky-Korsakov, or about other composers like Prokofiev or Bartok who were discovering archaeological primitivism at the same time. And though a few (not many, and they were not identified as such) of the photos came from the first production, unless I nodded off - which I may well have - there was nothing about the Rite as a ballet apart from the plot summary, and the names Diaghilev and Nijinsky were not even mentioned. I don't know how you can talk about this work without them.
The performance after intermission, under Martin West, didn't lack vigor, but it seemed a light, chipper, melodic rendition without the kind of impact the multi-media presentation had been preparing us for. No feeling of dinosaurs lumbering across the landscape, whoops wrong multi-media presentation. I felt a little underwhelmed, and my strongest feelings of the evening were reserved for the parking garage employee who refused to believe that the elevator was broken.
