“Bread-and-Butter” Never Sounded So Good

Herbert Blomstedt (photograph by Martin U.K. Lengemann, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the San Francisco Symphony wrapped up its month of visiting conductors with the return of Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt. The program consisted of only two symphonies, both composed during the first half of the nineteenth century and both inspired by travel and nature. The first half was devoted to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 68 (Pastoral) symphony in F major; and the intermission was followed by Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 56 (Scottish) symphony in A minor. The program will be given two more evening performances, tonight and tomorrow night.

Both symphonies may be said to be part of the bread-and-butter of the “standard repertoire.” The result is when an entire program is devoted to such repertoire, many listeners are likely to approach the performance with a here-we-go-again attitude. Those listeners clearly have not encountered Blomstedt. No matter how familiar his selections may be, there is never anything here-we-go-again about his approaches to performance; and last night was no exception to that basic rule.

Back in my undergraduate days, I had a music teacher who took a certain amount of pride in teasing apart Beethoven’s Opus 68 to demonstrate that each of its large-scale units was made from a limited number of building blocks assembled in a variety of different ways; and each of those building blocks was a product of similar assembly of much smaller cells. His “punch line,” in other words, was that the entire symphony was like one of those Russian assemblies of nested dolls, all identical in surface appearance but each of a different size. That simile tends to suggest the sort of cookie-cutter replication that is more readily (but not always correctly) associated with Philip Glass; and, to be fair, more than any other of his compositions, this symphony finds Beethoven playing with ostinato patterns carried sometimes to the most maddening extremes.

Nevertheless, those extremes are never maddening under Blomstedt’s baton. He knows that, just as is the case for Glass and Steve Reich, there is no such thing as mere repetition. Music flows through the evolution of changes, but those changes can take place on different durational scales. They do not always progress from one instant to the next; and, through his meticulous attention to dynamic levels, Blomstedt consistently brings a vibrantly organic sense of growing change to every one of Beethoven’s ostinato passages. The result is what I have come to call one of those “Little Gidding” moments, named after the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets poems, whose final stanza begins with these four lines:

  We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

I have yet to encounter Blomstedt ceasing from exploration; and even the most familiar Beethoven continues to emerge from his baton as a “first contact” experience.

Mendelssohn’s symphony may lack the structural sophistication that one finds in Beethoven. However, his rhetoric always seems to have a consistency forward-moving flow, whether one encounters it in the frenetic urgency of many of his minor-key chamber music compositions or in the easy-going flow of his major-key works. From that point of view, Opus 56 is an anomaly. The key is minor, but the rhetorical flow tends to be major-key. Indeed, the selection of minor has less to do with expressive intensity and more of an effort to capture the modal qualities of those impressions established during Mendelssohn’s visit to Scotland.

One had only to look at the program book to be alerted to the significance of that flow. Each of the first three movements was followed by a dash. Thus, even when a movement concluded with a full stop, there is still a sense of momentum that would carry the music into the following movement. George Balanchine clearly understood that momentum when he created his “Scotch Symphony” ballet for performance by the New York City Ballet. The choreography begins with the coda of the first movement flowing into the lively Scherzo of the second, which in turns flows into the almost narrative account of the Adagio cantabile, which leads the viewer to the festive Finale. (Balanchine recognized that the flow within the opening movement would not lend itself to choreographic interpretation.)

Blomstedt’s account of Mendelssohn’s music tended to prioritize overall flow above structural intricacies. In other words he recognized that Mendelssohn was no Beethoven. However, he also appreciated the solid rhetorical ground upon which Mendelssohn’s virtues resided; and, by the time he had brought the final movement to its grand conclusion, he had made all of these virtues unmistakably convincing to the attentive listeners in the audience. Thus, while the plan of the overall program may have threatened to leave Mendelssohn seeming secondary to Beethoven, Blomstedt knew that both composers had significant (but different) qualities. One left Davies at the end of the evening with a clear sense of the diversity of those qualities and that value of that diversity.