Take It to the Bridge!

Mahler fanatics are often prone to making vast overstatements about the power, meaning, and scope of many of his works (you know, stuff like claiming that Mahler predicted his own child’s death, or the entirety of the Second World War, etc.), and if I may allow myself a similar indulgence (I do not mean, incidentally, to take a stance that is explicitly counter-Mahler; I certainly find much of his music to be enjoyable, and I agree with Jack as to level of profundity reached by his Ninth Symphony (I do not think, though, that Mahler fanatics would be equally gracious towards Bruckner (the eventual topic of half of this post) – in fact, in one of his (many, many) poems, Frank O’Hara wrote the line “Mahler is great, Bruckner is terrible.” which I will use as my assumption for what all Mahler “fans” (again, to distinguish “fans” from people that recognize the brilliance and importance of Mahler without getting annoying about it) think)), I would say that Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony predicates (and predicts) the aesthetic of total war.

Barenboim, based on his conducting of the piece, I think would agree. His take on the Symphony was certainly operatic (read: Wagnerian), which led to sharp contrasts between the colossal portions of the Symphony and the pastoral. The scherzo, though it’s hard to be interpreted in any other way, becomes an onslaught of music that knows how to fuck shit up. I wish I had been at this concert with a friend or two, because then I could have tried out my Barenboim impersonation, which will now and forever be based on the way he conducted the end of the first movement (which ends, like, kinda loud). In lieu of that, let’s try an exercise in Simon Says, dear readers, to see if you can adequately capture the essence of Pete’s as-of-yet untested and unseen impersonation of Barenboim being ridiculous at the end of the first movement of Bruckner’s 9th Symphony:

Step 1) Heroically swing your arms to the final tempo of the piece, moving back and forth across your podium, as if making sure that every single person in the orchestra (audience) can see what you’re doing 2) When comes time for the last chord, or rather, just before the last chord, take a step back on your podium to make sure you have plenty of room for your last move and then 3) for the final chord, thrust your pelvis out, as though you are trying to show that embarrassing mustard stain on your crotch to the timpanist and then, with your right hand, gripping your baton in a tight fist, slowly pump your arm towards the sky, starting as low as possible, behind your ass, and extending it to about eye level, and then point forward, all the while not losing any of the arch or reach on your pelvic thrust. Finally, 4) Having cut the orchestra off, rock back out of your pelvic thrust and put a hand on the railing of your podium, as though you are James Brown waiting for someone to come from off stage with a cape to comfort you and escort you away.

Which is not to say that it wasn’t an amazing performance: it really was great. I mentioned this last year as well, but the string players here in Berlin generate tones that are just unheard in the States. The strings could absolutely keep up with the brass during the scherzo, making an incredibly deep sound that was all the more vicious for it’s depth. Barenboim also successfully kept his orchestra reigned in – there were definitely parts where he had his hand out to keep them down, and the players followed him (which made me flash back to many concerts of the Pittsburgh Symphony during Mariss Janson’s tenure, where he would also be giving the hand to the asshole principal trumpet player and never regarded (you could almost hear him thinking, in that Russian-cum-vampire accent “Please, George, you are ruining the show.”). And the musicians were really able to show off their virtuosity through the highly contrasted tempos – maintaining an amazing clarity through the various very swift sections.

I would say, though, that the third movement seemed much more tenuous. To me, it moves forward in such a glacial manner that the operatic gestures really started to feel out of place, and the performance definitely got a bit lost (at one point, Barenboim actually had to conduct the actual meter of the piece, with both hands). It’s really interesting music, so I think it was too bad that it got muddled. The musicians themselves too, I think were affected by the lack of momentum (however slow-going) in the third movement, and occasionally sounded tired. This is, though, of course, relative to a bar that is set incredibly high. Most of the rest of the audience didn’t seem to notice, though, and Barenboim got as thorough and long of an applause as anyone I’ve seen in Berlin except for Abbado last summer.

The first half of the concert was Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, which I had never heard before and knew (and still know) nothing about, so I feel even less qualified to speak towards it. An interesting piece though – my tolerance for Schoenberg being pretty high these days. The piece seemed very contrapuntal to me – with an expanded notion of what structures, exactly, can be counterpointed. Lot’s of very interesting sections that demonstrated the various ways that the soloist and ensemble can overlap. Before the concert, I was reading a placard about von Karajan, where he was talking (I think – my German isn’t that great so I didn’t understand every word) 40 years ago about the importance of recording, using the example of Schoenberg as a composer whose scores are idealistic, and can really only be realized in the studio with engineered sound (in fact, I think based on the example he gave, I think we was even speaking specifically of the Violin Concerto).

This reminds me of something that Pierre Boulez said at the concert of his music that Jack and I saw back in January about how much performance ability has advanced in the last half century. I think the performance of the Staatskapelle of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto reconfirms that notion: I think the performance was incredibly nuanced, with many shades of dynamic being present to a level that I think must have been as good if not better than what Karajan was trying to accomplish with microphones and adjusted levels back in the 60s. I’ve never been a stickler for music having meanings (if it’s not clear I was being tongue-in-cheek there up top about Bruckner’s 9th and total death), and I certainly wouldn’t hazard any guesses as to what, if anything, Schoenberg’s concerto was supposed to or does mean, but it was pretty cool to listen to (boy is that a lame note to end on (maybe if I write enough of these I’ll get better at it).