concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

"I'll see you after Mozart dies," I said cheerfully to my traveling companions, as we all headed off to our separate seats in Davies to hear the Requiem he died in the middle of composing. Of. (It feels like there's a preposition missing somewhere in that sentence.)

The problem with the Mozart Requiem is that Franz Süssmayr, the pupil who edited and finished the work off,* wasn't Mozart, and the final movements, which he had to write from scratch, lack a certain degree of inspiration. MTT tried to compensate for this by becoming louder and brasher. Nice singing, though, particularly from the chorus.

Two really innnnteresting postmodern works began the program. A contemporary Lithuanian, Mindaugas Urbaitis, composed a short acappella choral work, conducted by the symphony chorus director, Ragnar Bohlin, which evolves the theme of Mozart's Lacrimosa (a movement of the Requiem) out of a series of minimalist approximations, rather akin to roughly chopping out a block of stone and then slowly polishing it into an elegant sculpture. Of course Urbaitis functionally wrote this work backwards, with the goal in existence before he started, but turned around and played forwards it was as effective as Shostakovich similarly evolving the DSCH theme in his Tenth Symphony.

Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman. I've been to the chapel in Houston that this piece is named for and was written to be performed in. I thought it was the biggest ripoff of an art installation I'd ever seen, this despite the fact that they don't charge anything to see it. I knew that Rothko was a minimalist painter, but I hadn't realized that even he would decorate a squat, ugly, and otherwise empty concrete octagonal chamber with 14 paintings every one of which is in flat undifferentiated black. But I like Feldman's music; why is that? Because for all his filling in of wide sound spaces with hushed and utter stillness, the music has content. The quietness forces you really to listen, and there's something to listen to. This is a chamber music work (like everything by Feldman I know), with performers spread over the wide stage: timpanist, percussionist, celesta, a chorus in back, a conductor, and a violist who wanders around the stage. Listen carefully to the violist's melody-like phrases, as the timpani rumble in the distance, xylophone and wood blocks inject tiny splashes of color, and the chorus hums "nnnn". For half an hour, quite hasty by Feldman's Entish standards.

*And if you think Antonio Salieri had anything whatsoever to do with Mozart's Requiem, you've been watching too many ahistorical movies!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

By a curious coincidence, I saw Rothko Chapel performed the other night as well, here in New York. It was the fourth time for me (over a period of about thirty years), and as with all the other times it seemed a little underdramatized; it’s mid-period Feldman, not late Feldman, and has some genuinely dramatic moments (the viola swelling up to forte punctuated by tubular bells, for example). The original recording (on Odyssey, during Feldman’s lifetime) doesn’t hesitate to be a little more forceful; since then, influenced by the flatter affect of his late work, I suspect, performances have been more hesitant to raise their voices.

(By the way, the same metaphor has occurred to both of us: there is definitely something Entish about Feldman’s work that makes one think “hasty” when he does something different!)

What made the concert a necessity, though, was my first opportunity to see Gyorgy Kurtag’s (not going to try for the diacriticals) Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova in concert for the first time, another work of roughly the same vintage (written in the 70s, premiered in 1981) that has been a longtime favorite in recordings: a very different piece, a descendant of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (soprano, mixed chamber ensemble) but with a Hungarian accent and a very colorful 15-piece group.

Two pieces among the greatest of the 20th century, in my opinion.

P.S. Re Rothko, if you see a career retrospective of his work (as I have, twice), seeing him go from relatively representational to surrealist to three-color to monocolor, the final black paintings make a certain amount of sense in the career arc. Alone out of context they don’t work as well.

Don Keller

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I have had two encounters with Kurtág's music within the last few years. On both occasions - and I didn't even have a mental name-check to remember the first occasion when I wrote about the second, my reaction was as violently aversive as it is to Rothko. But I still like Feldman.