What: Music of Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Ravel
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: November 11 through 13, 2011
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The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra marked Veteran's Day with a heroic performance by pianist Horacio Gutiérrez and conductor Jun Märkl of Beethoven's Concerto No. 5 ("Emperor")—a work written under the cloud of war and occupation. Conflict and triumph of a different sort were featured in a deeply moving reading of Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, and the circle was closed with Ravel's essay on Armageddon in 3/4 time, La Valse. Quite an evening.
When Beethoven was writing his concerto in 1809, Vienna was not so much the fabled “City of Dreams” as a metropolis of nightmares. The French laid siege to it with shelling so fierce that at one point the composer took refuge in his brother’s house and covered his head with pillows to escape the din. “[L]ife around me”, he wrote, “is wild and disturbing, nothing but drums, cannons, soldiers, misery of every sort.” The royal family—including Beethoven’s friend and patron Archduke Rudolf—fled, along with many of the notable families with whom the composer had become close.
Left alone and, once the French occupation began, in difficult financial circumstances due to rapid inflation, Beethoven had little else to do but compose. The Fifth Concerto is probably the most famous work to emerge from this difficult period, although the Op. 81a piano sonata (“Les Adieux”) is probably a close second. Both were dedicated to Rudolph.
Much has been written about the Concerto No. 5, so I won’t presume to waste your time with my own analysis, especially when there are concise and informative articles on Wikipedia and at the Classy Classical blog . The magisterial first movement, the wistful second, and, after that famous descending figure in the bassoon, the jolly concluding rondo all show Beethoven at his best. They offer a wealth of opportunities to shine for soloist and conductor.
And shine is what Mr. Gutiérrez and Mr. Märkl did. Like Eric Le Sage, who was so impressive last week in the Schumann concerto, Mr. Gutiérrez eschewed flash and theatricality at the keyboard, opting instead for a straightforward, no-nonsense approach. An entrance, a nod to the conductor, and he was off. Physically, he’s a great bear of a performer, but at the keyboard he did delicate and lyrical as well as forceful and heroic. That famous fortissimo-to-diminuendo barrage of octaves in the first movement was a good case in point. He and Mr. Märkl went, in short, where Beethoven took them, and compelled us to come along.
Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung), which opened the second half of the concert, deals with war of a different sort—the struggle of an artist’s soul to shuffle off a dying mortal coil and find the ideals he strove for in (to quote from the composer’s detailed narrative) “everlasting Time and Space”. Although Strauss, on his deathbed, remarked that “dying is exactly like I composed it 60 years ago”, there’s no getting around the fact that this is a young man’s view of the transition from here to eternity. It’s filled with great, cinematic torrents of sound, passages of nostalgic longing, and, finally, one of the most sublime finales to be found anywhere.
The dramatic stakes, then, are high, and a good performance should be both exhilarating and touching. Conducting without a score—and therefore free adopt a far more freewheeling style on the podium than he did in the Beethoven—Mr. Märkl delivered all that and more. The dramatic moments were powerful. The passages when the protagonist “recollects his childhood, and then his youthful days of passionate striving” brought a lump to my throat, anyway. And the final apotheosis was translucent.
The evening concluded with Ravel’s La Valse, a work that began in 1911 as “a piece in the style of the earlier Strauss, not Richard” entitled simply Wein (Vienna). And, in fact, a bit of it shows up in the Valses nobles et sentimentales from that same year. Before it could be completed, however, World War I (in which the composer served as an ambulance driver) intervened, and by the time La Valse was submitted to (and foolishly rejected by) Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in 1919, it had become something far more profound. Ravel described it as “an impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny leading to death”. I can’t hear it without envisioning a huge, ornate machine spinning faster and faster until it hurls itself to pieces—as the complex structure of 19th-century Europe did in the so-called “war to end all wars”.
Once again, Mr. Märkl conducted without a score, this time giving full vent to the Viennese waltz that inspired the piece, complete with the Luftpausen (those minute hesitations between the first and second beat) that are characteristic of the genre. As in last week’s Daphnis et Chloé, La Valse is filled with brilliant orchestral writing that offers nearly everyone a chance to show off, including infrequently heard instruments such as the bass clarinet and contrabassoon. The symphony musicians rose to the challenge, as they nearly always do, and the results were exemplary—as, indeed, they were all night.
Next at Powell Hall: David Robertson is back on the podium with Bruckner’s titanic Symphony No. 7, along with Purcell’s Chacony in G minor and Luciano Berio’s Chorale (on Sequenza VIII) on Friday and Saturday, November 18 and 19, 2011. Erin Schreiber is the violin soloist in the Berio. For more information you may call 314-534-1700, visit stlsymphony.org, like the Saint Louis Symphony Facebook page, or follow @slso on Twitter.
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