Schuman/Shaham
Tuesday evening Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra were at Carnegie Hall, with Beethoven 3 on their agenda along with Gil Shaham playing William Schuman's Violin Concerto. I'd been looking forward to this one for a while: I got hooked on the Schuman concerto on CD a couple years back, and the piece doesn't get around that much.
It turns out the Concerto works really well in concert, which I'm glad to know (you can never quite take this for granted when you've heard a piece on CD). It's a rigorously well-crafted work: you can hear everything, the soloist is balanced excellently with the orchestra, and musically the piece is drawn taut, with nothing wasted either expressively or thematically. Shaham was, unsurprisingly, a powerful advocate for the solo part, which is composed in rugged lines well matched to his impossibly sturdy-yet-sensitive tone.
The SFSO clearly played their guts out for the piece, too, which demands constant razor-sharp precision. This is one of those modern concertos that uses the orchestra as an equal participant in the drama, rather than a foil to the soloist. (Think Stravinsky and Shostakovich, in particular.) There was obviously a lot of orchestral preparation and attention that went into the performance, and it absolutely paid off. It's an unglamorous work, flinty and chromatic and without a lot of easily-come-by luster; hearing something in this expressive mode executed so well (not to mention performed in the first place!) is a rare pleasure.
I find the Schuman Violin Concerto to be extremely moving, in an unobvious and kind of hard-to-pin-down way. Schuman wrote it in 1947 and revised it in the late 1950s, and I hear it as a letter from early Cold War America: here's your national strength and vigor, the celebration of victory and of industry flexing its muscle, but with a pessimistic undertow that can't be shaken off. The violin, here, strings nervous melodies over the landscape like high-tension wires over hills and valleys; there, steps aside to sing in a melancholy voice of reason. Even in its virtuosic moments, the violin is more poetic than propulsive. The second movement begins with a slow brutalist brass fanfare, soon melted down into quiet under emphatic but glum timpani thumps. Later the brass sculpt a dissonant militarized climax that might imaginably celebrate a parade of missile-bearing trucks; at the very conclusion an attempted sunrise never quite resolves, optimistic oratory corroded by slashes of strings and a battery of percussion; chimes and cymbals sounding a note of alarm in the midst of affirmation. This is "Be Glad Then, America" with a sardonic shake of the head; the parade ground in a cold drizzle; the superpower paving highways and digging bomb shelters, the heartland pumping out leaded gasoline.
I strongly doubt this is what William Schuman was getting at, but it touches a nerve for me. There's something honest in this concerto, and you don't hear quite the same thing in other American orchestral music.
Allan Kozinn in the NY Times asks why you don't hear this piece as often as Barber, Shostakovich, or Prokofiev. Usually "unsentimentalized borderline atonality" is going to be your winning bet. I agree with the idea behind the question, though.
Beethoven's Third Symphony was really quite good. The funeral-march second movement sounded like something out of Mahler, sprawling and significant. It's really amazing what the man could freight a classical symphony with. I heard a few more tones of desolated Americana in the piece, but I might have still been thinking about the Schuman concerto.
While I'm on the subject, Schuman's Fourth Symphony is a surprisingly good piece, too. Good luck hearing that performed live, though.
Ross Edwards's 1988 Violin Concerto came before intermission, with Ani Kavafian soloing. The piece has sprightliness and good nature to spare, but it didn't sound too gracious for the orchestra, which sounded a bit shaggy and tended to bury much of what Kavafian played in the lower register. This is also an obscure piece, and I love hearing obscure pieces, but it's a shame when they don't quite come off completely.
It turns out the Concerto works really well in concert, which I'm glad to know (you can never quite take this for granted when you've heard a piece on CD). It's a rigorously well-crafted work: you can hear everything, the soloist is balanced excellently with the orchestra, and musically the piece is drawn taut, with nothing wasted either expressively or thematically. Shaham was, unsurprisingly, a powerful advocate for the solo part, which is composed in rugged lines well matched to his impossibly sturdy-yet-sensitive tone.
The SFSO clearly played their guts out for the piece, too, which demands constant razor-sharp precision. This is one of those modern concertos that uses the orchestra as an equal participant in the drama, rather than a foil to the soloist. (Think Stravinsky and Shostakovich, in particular.) There was obviously a lot of orchestral preparation and attention that went into the performance, and it absolutely paid off. It's an unglamorous work, flinty and chromatic and without a lot of easily-come-by luster; hearing something in this expressive mode executed so well (not to mention performed in the first place!) is a rare pleasure.
I find the Schuman Violin Concerto to be extremely moving, in an unobvious and kind of hard-to-pin-down way. Schuman wrote it in 1947 and revised it in the late 1950s, and I hear it as a letter from early Cold War America: here's your national strength and vigor, the celebration of victory and of industry flexing its muscle, but with a pessimistic undertow that can't be shaken off. The violin, here, strings nervous melodies over the landscape like high-tension wires over hills and valleys; there, steps aside to sing in a melancholy voice of reason. Even in its virtuosic moments, the violin is more poetic than propulsive. The second movement begins with a slow brutalist brass fanfare, soon melted down into quiet under emphatic but glum timpani thumps. Later the brass sculpt a dissonant militarized climax that might imaginably celebrate a parade of missile-bearing trucks; at the very conclusion an attempted sunrise never quite resolves, optimistic oratory corroded by slashes of strings and a battery of percussion; chimes and cymbals sounding a note of alarm in the midst of affirmation. This is "Be Glad Then, America" with a sardonic shake of the head; the parade ground in a cold drizzle; the superpower paving highways and digging bomb shelters, the heartland pumping out leaded gasoline.
I strongly doubt this is what William Schuman was getting at, but it touches a nerve for me. There's something honest in this concerto, and you don't hear quite the same thing in other American orchestral music.
Allan Kozinn in the NY Times asks why you don't hear this piece as often as Barber, Shostakovich, or Prokofiev. Usually "unsentimentalized borderline atonality" is going to be your winning bet. I agree with the idea behind the question, though.
Beethoven's Third Symphony was really quite good. The funeral-march second movement sounded like something out of Mahler, sprawling and significant. It's really amazing what the man could freight a classical symphony with. I heard a few more tones of desolated Americana in the piece, but I might have still been thinking about the Schuman concerto.
* * * * *
While I'm on the subject, Schuman's Fourth Symphony is a surprisingly good piece, too. Good luck hearing that performed live, though.
* * * * *
Ross Edwards's 1988 Violin Concerto came before intermission, with Ani Kavafian soloing. The piece has sprightliness and good nature to spare, but it didn't sound too gracious for the orchestra, which sounded a bit shaggy and tended to bury much of what Kavafian played in the lower register. This is also an obscure piece, and I love hearing obscure pieces, but it's a shame when they don't quite come off completely.
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