Soprano Dawn Upshaw (right) with the members of the Brentano String Quartet: Mark Steinberg, Serena Canin, Nina Lee, and Misha Amory (from their SFP event page)
Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) launched its Great Artists and Ensembles Series of concerts with a recital by the Brentano String Quartet. Consisting of violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory, and cellist Nina Lee, the group made its sixth visit to SFP, beginning the program on familiar ground with a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 464 quartet in A major. For the remainder of the program, the ensemble was joined by soprano Dawn Upshaw, returning for her ninth SFP appearance since her recital debut in May of 1990. The first half of the program concluded with “Il tramonto,” Ottorino Respighi’s setting of the text of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “The Sunset,” translated into Italian by Roberto Ascoli; and the second half was devoted entirely to Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 10 (second) quartet in F-sharp minor. The last two of this quartet’s four movements require a soprano singing settings of two poems by Stefan George.
For those that associate Schoenberg primarily with “emancipating” dissonance and departing from the need for a “tonal center” defined through the dominant-tonic progression, Opus 10 was most likely a surprise (and, hopefully, a pleasant one). The themes are easily recognizable, and the harmonic progressions seem to continue along a rhetorical trail that had been blazed by Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. However, that rich rhetoric begins to unravel in the third movement, which sets a poem entitled “Litany,” depicting the aftermath of a hard-fought battle.
The final movement then sets the poem “Entrückung” (rapture) with what may be Schoenberg’s first effort to employ all twelve chromatic pitches without organizing them around a tonal center. The poem begins with the sentence “Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten” (I feel air from another planet). Three stanzas later, George continues with “Ich löse mich in tönen, kreisend, webend,/Ungründigen danks und unbenamten lobes/Dem grossen atem wunschlos mich ergebend” (I lose myself in tones, circling, weaving,/With unfathomable thanks and unnamed praise,/Bereft of desire, I surrender myself to the great breath). In the context of Schoenberg’s biography, George’s words seem to forecast how Schoenberg would approach making music for the next several decades.
Taken as a whole, the quartet thus amounts to a journey from the certainty of past rhetorical practices into the unfamiliarity of “air from another planet.” Nevertheless, signs of uncertainty are already lurking in the opening movements; and Brentano presented a performance through which one could appreciate the substance behind Schoenberg’s journey from familiar practices to yet unknown ones. Upshaw’s delivery of George’s texts reinforced that journey, introducing new rhetorical dimensions through which other points of view were established. One might say that she endowed the abstractions of Schoenberg’s music with a personality that reflected his own dispositions upon encountering that “air from another planet.”
Those who know Schoenberg by his writings, as well as his music, probably know that, for all of his pursuits of new forms of expression, he never lost his ability to take pleasure in Mozart’s music. Indeed, he once observed that just about any composition by Mozart could be approached in terms of an operatic narrative in miniature. Making that case for the K. 464 quartet may be a bit of a stretch. Nevertheless, Mozart wrote this quartet as a gift for Joseph Haydn; and it is easy to imagine that a dramatic gesture in some kind of “card of appreciation” accompanied that gift.
Sure enough, at the end of the theme-and-variations (third) movement, we encounter Mozart responding to Haydn’s tricks with a few of his own. The final variation sees the cello indulge in a jolly little ostinato bass line. Every now and then the other three instruments pick up a repetition or two, but it is clear that the cello rules over this passage. One is reminded of the sorts of buffa operatic roles that are often assigned to the lower male voices. Indeed, it is easy to imagine Gioachino Rossini being inspired by Mozart’s rhetoric and following up on it in some of the comic moments in his operas.
In this context Respighi might seem like an unlikely “spacer” between Mozart and Schoenberg. For that matter, “Il tramonto” was composed after Schoenberg had completed his Opus 10 quartet. In the overall context of the evening’s program, it was very much music unto itself; but it did provide another platform for the interplay between a vocalist and a string quartet.
Respighi’s project was an ambitious one. At the age of 34 he was basically an unknown academic, but he clearly had a rich imagination. When one reads Shelley on the page, “The Sunset” emerges as a stream of run-on sentences, almost as if Shelley had discovered stream-of-consciousness long before it became a technical term. Ascoli’s translation does its best to parallel all of that florid sentence structure. As a result, Respighi is left with the task of applying phrasing that will enhance, rather than obscure, the semantics.
The music is sufficiently compelling that one might even accuse Respighi of delivering Shelley’s erotic message better than Shelley himself had done. Upshaw clearly know how to serve as the bearer of that message, and her chemistry with Brentano could not have been more intimate. In the grand scheme of music history, it would be easy to dismiss “Il tramonto” as an immature oddity; but both Upshaw and Brentano clearly gave their all to blunt any such casual dismissal.
No comments:
Post a Comment