Above: Maestro Leon Botstein, in a Matt Dine portrait
~ Author: Brad S. Ross
Friday, January 25th, 2019 – It was another fine program Friday night at Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium as the music director Leon Botstein led The American Symphony Orchestra in an all-American program of under-performed greats aptly titled “Sounds of the American Century.” And that it most certainly was.
The evening began with Fantasy for Orchestra, a tone poem by the late violinist and educator Robert Mann (above). Mann, who died last year at the ripe old age of 97, was a long-time staple of the New York classical music scene, in front of and behind the scenes, and was first violinist of the Juilliard String Quartet for over fifty years. In addition to performance and education, Mann also dabbled in composition to pleasantly effective results. His Fantasy for Orchestra was originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and first performed by that ensemble under the direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos at Carnegie Hall itself in 1957.
The piece opened on the violas sustaining a single note. Other members of the orchestra soon joined and a collage of atonal sonorities began to emerge. This menace continued to build until a percussive roll launched the work into more energized and frenzied territory. Mann’s Fantasy played almost programmatically, as if scoring the unseeing drama of some unsettling film or ballet. A haunting violin solo emerged, performed by the concertmaster Cyrus Beroukhim, as harp ostinati and melancholic low brass chords created an almost dream-like atmosphere. After a near-silent decrescendo, the drama then built up to a sequence of full-orchestra blasts that rang the piece to a volatile conclusion. This was a decidedly above-average mid-century tone poem, played with force by the American Symphony Orchestra, and one that should warrant more-frequent airings.
Next, receiving its long-overdue New York premiere, was Concertante for Piano and Orchestra by Vivian Fine (above). Fine, who was one of a handful pioneering female composers in the early 20th century, is perhaps best known for her many chamber works, including the atonally adventurous Capriccio for Oboe and String Trio. The Concertante for Piano and Orchestra, composed in 1944, was the first of her orchestral repertoire.
After Mann’s Fantasy for Orchestra, Fine’s Concertante was almost strikingly tonal, as if ripped from the pages of some lost Romantic-era score composed sixty years prior. Comprising two movements, it opened on a stately and delicate Andante con moto and closed on a convivial and spirited Allegro risoluto.
Pianist Charlie Albright (above) made solid sport of the piece’s numerous solo passages and improvised an impressively intricate and lively cadenza that charged the work to its end. His admirable commitment to the piece brought much life to what otherwise struck me as a very dainty and anachronistic work, one I don’t expect to hear programmed again anytime soon.
A minor ovation brought Albright back to the piano bench for an encore of a work that, as a friend of his apparently put it, “takes balls to perform.” He then ripped into a breezy rendition of 1957’s “Great Balls of Fire” that cheekily concluded the first half of the concert.
After intermission came a performance of Prism, a three-movement orchestral set by written in 1980 the great and often unsung composer Jacob Druckman (above). Inspired in part by Luciano Berio’s 1968 Sinfonia, Druckman crafted Prism by blending the musical styles of historic composers with his own decidedly modern voice. Fittingly, each movement references the music of a Baroque or Classical-era composer for which it is titled.
The first movement “After Marc-Antoine Charpentier” began on otherworldly textures consisting of percussion, woodwind clusters, pizzicato hits, and haunting tremolo in the strings. Quotations of Charpentier soon emerged, complete with a synthesized harpsichord, but carrying with it the wild distortions and eerie timbres of the 20th century. The second movement, “After Francesco Cavalli”, carried on in similar fashion, blending the sonorities of these disjointed eras. A clarinet solo accompanied by atonal statements throughout the orchestra brought some much-appreciated color and allowed the piece to stand more fully on its own legs, rather than succumb to pastiche. Violent punctuations opened the third movement, “After Luigi Cherubini,” which was occasionally discursive to a fault. Nevertheless, this built to an impressively bombastic finale that rekindled any waning interest.
Compositions that blend the styles of different musical eras like Prism or Berio’s Sinfonia (or Steven Stucky’s Dreamwaltzes or John C. Adams’s Absolute Jest, for that matter) tend to walk a fine line between tasteful reference and cheeky gimmickry. While the merits of such genre-bending continue to be up for debate, I must confess enjoying Prism best when lived in its own era.
The final piece of the evening was the Third Symphony by one of America’s greatest composers, William Schuman (above). A contemporary of Robert Mann, Schuman was also a staple of New York’s classical music scene, albeit with a much wider influence. Throughout the course of his life, he served as the president of the Juilliard School, president of Lincoln Center, and in 1943 became the first-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Among his impressive catalog of compositions are numerous ballets and concertante, two operas, dozens of chamber and orchestral works, and a whopping ten symphonies. The Third Symphony, composed in 1941, is perhaps his most famous.
Clocking in at about thirty minutes, the symphony is cast in two parts played with short pause—Part I comprising a Passacaglia and Fugue and Part II concluding on a Chorale and Toccata. It begins on a slow and somber viola line that is gradually joined by the remainder of the strings and, finally, the rest of orchestra. This tragic crescendo continues until a great fortissimo brass statement launches the work into new, dramatic frontiers. Its form relaxed, but never rambling, the rest of the work is colored with mysterious string runs, noble brass statements, haunting solo passages, and occasionally violent musical statements. Its final Toccata, opening on droning bass and military snare, eventually leads to vigorous string runs and bombastic low brass that slowly build it to a brilliant full-orchestral finale.
Alternately lively and melancholic, stately and haunting, beautiful and ferocious, the symphony marks a high point of American orchestral writing. It is one our nation’s finest symphonies and should be played as often as any of the best works of Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein. Alas, it tends to languish, as do so many other great American orchestral works, on the dusty shelves of music libraries as the works of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart are performed ad infinitum. It’s a scandal that American orchestras don’t find more time in their seasons to honor the music of their native soil, one that I’m happy to see Leon Botstein and company attempting to combat.
While I wasn’t always thrilled with this interpretation of the piece, which occasionally leaned on the sluggish side, this still ultimately made for triumphant conclusion to a grand evening of American classical music at Carnegie Hall. The mission of the American Symphony Orchestra, now in its 57th season, is one of the most admirable kind. New Yorkers could do far worse than to hear this orchestra unearth great works of art from our nation’s past.
~ Brad S Ross
Oberon's Glade 