The last of the three videos uploaded to SFSymphony+ at the beginning of this past week is also the most ambitious, as well as the most challenging. Like the previously released recording of Robert Schumann’s Opus 97 (third) symphony in E-flat major, the content was captured during a performance in Davies Symphony Hall this past June 24. The Schumann symphony was played after the seldom encountered “Metamorphosen” by Richard Strauss.
This music is a far cry from the lush rhetoric that Strauss could evoke from a full orchestra, whether on a stage or in the pit of an opera house. It was composed for 23 solo strings (ten violins, five violas, five cellos, and three basses) on a commission by Paul Sacher, the founder and Director of the Collegium Musicum Zürich, which gave the first performance on January 25, 1946. Indeed, it was composed during the final months of World War II; and, thanks to Sacher, Strauss was able to work in the safety of Switzerland.
My wife and I were in Davies on that June 24, and we were well aware of an abundance of video equipment, most of which was remotely controlled. Two of those remotely-controlled devices can be seen in this screen shot extracted from the resulting recording:
The video was directed by Frank Zamacona, working with a team specializing in robotic control, including Brian Shimetz, Paul Peralta, and Patrea Cheney.
It would probably be fair to say that the act of listening to “Metamorphosen” is as challenging as that of performing it. The very idea of thematic content emerges from little more than a stepwise descent from G to C in the minor mode. It is only during the coda of this half-hour composition that the attentive listener will associate that descent with the second (funeral march) movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. That coda couples that descent with the opening measures of the funeral march, as if Strauss finally allows us to peek behind the curtain that conceals the Wizard of Oz.
However, the path from that opening statement to the “punch line” coda is thickly overgrown (if I may appropriate the title of Leoš Janáček’s cycle of fifteen piano pieces). Strauss’ skill at interleaving his phrases among 23 solo “voices” is nothing short of downright uncanny. However, half an hour of the complexity of those interleavings is likely to fatigue even the most sympathetic or enthusiastic listener. Thus, when I reflected on my own efforts the morning after the performance, I found myself wondering “whether the addition of video can enlighten the listening experience.”
Watching that video last night left me wondering whether Zamacona and his crew were as perplexed as I was. I remembered that, when Jordan Whitelaw directed telecasts of live performances of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, he would call his cues while following the same score used by the conductor. The full score of “Metamorphosen” runs to about 90 pages, and the textures are as thick to the eye as they are to the ear. I have no idea whether Zamacona used that same score, but I can observe that there were many more instances of images that were not particularly consistent with the listening experience than I have encountered in Zamacona’s other skillfully-crafted videos.
Perhaps this is music that benefits from the distance between the performers and the audience. Perhaps, where this music is concerned, any attempt at video close-ups is likely to be more confounding than enlightening. As I discovered through my encounters with Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 9 chamber symphony in E-flat major (composed for fifteen solo instruments), the only way to get your head around the music is to listen to it frequently. Every time I return for another encounter with “Metamorphosen,” the listening experience tends to be less perplexing than it had been during past experiences.
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