Petrenko’s Program of Mid-Century Modernism

Berlin Philharmonic Chief Conductor Kirill Petrenko (from the Digital Concert Hall Web page for this program)

This is the season in which Kirill Petrenko began his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, giving his first performance in that capacity this past August 19. While I have been familiar with his name for some time, I am not sure I have encountered any of his recordings; nor do I have any knowledge of his having performed in San Francisco (or, for that matter, anywhere else in the United States). Today I decided to draw upon the services of the Digital Concert Hall for my own “first contact” experience with this conductor.

I was particularly drawn to the approach he had taken in preparing his program, which did not include any guest soloists. The Web page for the concert described that program as consisting of “ three compositional masterworks, all of which were composed during the decade between 1940 and 1950 and explore entirely different avenues of musical modernism but are not based on Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique.” The program began with Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphony in Three Movements,” composed in 1945. It then advanced to 1950 with a five-movement ballet suite by German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann entitled Alagoana (Caprichos Brasileiros). The second half of the program was devoted entirely to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 45 “Symphonic Dances.” Completed in 1940 and written for Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, it was his last major composition.

All three of these pieces have strong choreographic connotations. Admittedly, George Balanchine did not create his ballet based on this particular Stravinsky score until about a year after Stravinsky’s death. However, from a structural point of view, “Symphony in Three Movements” has less to do with the conventional forms of symphonic movements and more to do with an earlier score that Stravinsky composed for Balanchine’s one-act ballet “Jeu de cartes” (card game), which happens to be structured in three “deals.”

Stravinsky himself claimed that the symphony captured his personal impressions of World War II; and the rhythms in the first movement seem to suggest Morse code communications between headquarters and a battlefield. Far more interesting, however, is how the score as a whole can almost be taken as a musical approach to cubism. Rather than following “sonata form,” the score abounds with a diverse variety of thematic “blocks,” each of which almost seems to have its own characteristic geometry. As each movement progresses, those blocks are assembled and reassembled in different combinations. This results in a dazzling array of sonorities and rhythms in which any sense of a recapitulation seems almost coincidental. It is through the vigorous rhythms of such assembly that “Symphony in Three Movements” emerges as a “descendant” of the “Jeu de cartes” score, which is probably why Balanchine eventually turned to it for one of his more abstract ballets.

It was easy to assume that Petrenko conducted this piece with a clear sense of what those “blocks” were and the many different ways in which they assembled themselves. As a result, rather than evoking the horrors of World War II, his interpretation evolved as one of playful discovery. Indeed, there was hardly a moment when the camera was directed at him and he was not smiling. If this meant that his interpretation departed from any connotations of World War II, then one had to admit that it was still true to the marks on the score pages, deriving a richly expressive account of all of those marks.

That underlying sense of “auditory cubism” could also be found in the Zimmermann suite. While the title clearly suggested Brazilian connotations, none of those connotations crossed the line into the domain of denotation that can be found in most of the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos or some of the Latin American impressions of Darius Milhaud. Instead, there was again a sense of those thematic “blocks,” although in this case rhythm seemed to play a significantly different role than it had in the Stravinsky symphony. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of Petrenko’s interpretation was as joyous as it had been in his approach to Stravinsky.

Rachmaninoff’s Opus 45, on the other hand, endured a mercilessly hard rap for the better part of the second half of the twentieth century. In the context of World War II, listeners obsessed with all the new directions promised by atonality treated the piece as a battleship consigned to mothballs. The current century, fortunately, has produced several conductors willing to take the piece at face value and present its virtues to attentive audiences.

Here again there is rich instrumentation, but cubism is the last source of a metaphor one might evoke for Rachmaninoff’s management of sonorities. Instead, instrumentation is there to cast thematic material under lights of different colors. However, to draw upon another artistic metaphor, Rachmaninoff’s palette provided a diversity of those colors. Petrenko’s conducting could not have done better justice to all of that diversity; and, for a change, the camera work frequently guided the attentive eye to the sources of those different colors. Furthermore, when the camera was directed at the conductor, one could appreciate the broader scope of emotional dispositions conveyed by his physiognomy.

Taken as a whole, this was a highly satisfying “virtual concert” account leaving me curious as to how Petrenko would address other repertoire selections.