Friday, June 25, 2021

Richard Strauss’ Opacity of Metamorphosis

The return of the full brass section of the San Francisco Symphony may have been the highlight of last night’s program in Davies Symphony Hall; but the “keystone” of the program was the seldom performed “Metamorphosen” by Richard Strauss. This work is distinguished for having been composed for 23 solo strings (ten violins, five violas, five cellos, and three basses). It was composed during the final months of World War II and commissioned by Paul Sacher, the founder and Director of the Collegium Musicum Zürich, which gave the first performance on January 25, 1946. Strauss was present for the occasion and had conducted the final rehearsal.

As may be suspected from the instrumentation, this music is significantly thick in its textures. Arrangements were made last night to prepare a video account of the performance; and, if ever there was a composition in which the eye needed as much guidance as the ear, this is it. Whether or not Strauss bore in mind that the biological process of metamorphosis is frequently opaque will be left for the reader to decide. The larva caterpillar spins itself into it pupal enclosure before its transformation into an adult butterfly; and one can probably make a case that the transformations that unfold in “Metamorphoses” take place at a “deep structure,” which is “hidden from view.”

The author of the Wikipedia page for “Metamorphosen” leads the reader through the abundance of thematic references in Strauss’ score; but that description does little to sort out the “surface structure” from any “deeper” foundations. Personally, I prefer to take the caterpillar-butterfly approach to the overall “journey” through the score. The “larva” is the stepwise descent from G to C in the minor mode, a motif that should be easily associated with the second (funeral march) movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. The butterfly that emerges at the conclusion explicitly quotes the first four measures of that funeral march in what amounts to the clearest thematic statement of the entire composition. While there is an abundance of material between beginning and end, the textures are so thick that the music could just as easily been locked into its own pupal enclosure.

The reader should be able to appreciate that I have yet to encounter an audio recording that does justice to this music. Salonen’s account last night in Davies provided my first experience in which things just began to make sense. Given that the duration is roughly half an hour, the journey through this music is far from a walk in the park. While I continue to feel more than a little frustrated with this music, I have to confess that, in the midst of last night’s video gear, I am most curious to see whether the addition of video can enlighten the listening experience.

Cologne Cathedral as seen from the Rhine (photograph by AtmikaPaul, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Far more accessible was the instrumental richness of the final work on the program, Robert Schumann’s Opus 97 (third) symphony in E-flat major. Schumann was inspired by a trip to the Rhineland; and the symphony is often known as the “Rhenish.” There are no end of musical references to the churning flow on the Rhine, along with an evocation of the Cologne Cathedral, situated near the banks of the Rhine.

Whatever the composer may have had in mind, however, last night’s performance was, for all intents and purposes, a celebratory declaration that the full complement of brass players had returned to Davies. Cologne Cathedral made its appearance in the fourth movement with the luscious chorale rhetoric of the trombone section, and the horn section never missed an opportunity to seize the metaphorical spotlight. All of that enthusiasm made for a scrappier account of the score than one might usually expect; but there was no doubt that the audience, as a whole, loved every minute of it.

On the other hand those of us interested in “the music itself” got to enjoy three selections for two brass choirs composed by Giovanni Gabrieli and arranged for contemporary instruments by SFS Principal Trombone Timothy Higgins. The two groups of players were situated behind the opposing Side Terrace seats, making for a viable approximation to the polyphonic exchanges one would have encountered in St Mark’s Basilica during Gabrieli’s tenure there. Equally impressive were the polished homophonic passages through which one could appreciate the “heavenly” blending of brass sonorities in different pitch registers.

The brass players are back, and their return was most welcome.

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