Composer Magnus Lindberg (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)
Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony in the world premiere performance of Magnus Lindberg’s third piano concerto. The soloist was Yuja Wang, and the concerto was composed with her prodigious capacity for technique in mind. However, Lindberg also takes great delight in writing music for very large ensembles; and last night was definitely an “all-hands on deck” offering, drawing on the full resources of strings, winds, and brass with more instruments in the percussion section than can be enumerated.
Over the course of Wang’s many performances in Davies, she has cultivated the impression that she can play damn near anything. That was the impression that registered with Lindberg, and he was not shy about dialing the level of “anything” up to eleven. In the program notes James M. Keller found the mot juste in describing Lindberg’s composition as a “hyper-virtuoso concerto.” Not only were all ten fingers going across the entire keyboard with mind-boggling coordination, but also Wang never seemed to let up in her almost explosive expenditure of energy.
As impressive has this experience may have been, the “information level” (in Claude Shannon’s mathematical interpretation of that word) was so high across the full extent of resources that Salonen had to lead, that is it hard to imagine even the most attentive mind coming to grips with the full scope of the performance. Thus, any attempt at description that I can provide will most likely resemble that of a single blind man grasping one part of an elephant. While Keller’s account called attention to the rich chromaticism of Lindberg’s harmonies, I have to say that I was hard-pressed to get my head around any sense of harmonic progression. Indeed, my own focus of attention dismissed such progressions to the background, while I tried to “parse” Lindberg’s polyphony, which seemed to have more to do with rhythms than with pitch classes. Indeed, rhythm seemed to be the composer’s primary priority in an architecture that advanced through three noticeably distinctive movements.
One thing is certain: There is far too much “information” to be grasped during a “first contact” with this concerto. To continue with the Shannon analogy, mind cannot begin to find the patterns among the bits when it is still trying to sort out the “ones and zeros” of the bits themselves. This is music in which familiarity is a strong prerequisite for attentive listening; and familiarity demands more than one encounter with performance, no matter how compelling that performance may be. I look forward to an opportunity for my second encounter with this concerto, but only after all those memories currently rattling around in my head have had a chance to subside!
The program as a whole followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony format. Lindberg’s concerto was framed by two twentieth-century selections, both of which involved a similarly rich scope of sonorities. The overture was Carl Nielsen’s Opus 17 “Helios,” which basically “documents” the movements of the sun across the sky from the first signs of light at dawn to the settling into the darkness of dusk. This was the one composition that did not involve any percussion other than the timpani. However, there was no shortage of rich textures of instrumentation across both the winds and brass families.
Those familiar with Salonen’s recordings know that he accounted for all six of Nielsen’s symphonies with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra during his tenure as a Sony artist. These tracks were interleaved with shorter works, one of which was “Helios,” included on the album with the fourth (“Inextinguishable”) symphony. Nevertheless, there are subtleties in Nielsen’s palette of sonorities that can only really be appreciated through “physical presence,” rather than even the best recording technologies. Salonen had full command of that “physical presence” in last night’s account of “Helios,” whetting the appetite for further samples from the Nielsen canon.
That particular Sony album was first released in 1986. Ten years later, Salonen recorded performances of the “Concerto for Orchestra” and “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” by Béla Bartók with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last night he returned to “Concerto for Orchestra” for the “symphony” portion of the program, following the intermission. I came to know this music through the RCA album of Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and there was a time when I would play that album to death. However, here, too, there are far more subtleties in the blends of instrumental sonorities than can be registered through recording technology.
Unless I am mistaken, last night was my first “physical” encounter with the Bartók “Concerto;” and each of the five movements confronted me with experiences that had never registered when listening to recordings. This was not just a matter of sonorities. Salonen had clearly made many strategic decisions in the physical disposition of the instrumentalists. Listening was not just a matter of the overall blend. Rather it involved the many ways in which the different instruments would play off each other.
This is particularly evident in the playful approach taken in the second movement. This explores the sonorities of five different instruments: bassoon, oboe, clarinet, flute, and muted trumpet. Each sonority is established by a pair of instruments separated by a different pitch interval as follows:
- bassoons: minor sixth
- oboes: minor third
- clarinet: minor seventh
- flute: perfect fifth
- trumpet: major second
These “couples” are accompanied by the string section, along with a solo side drum (played last night by Jacob Nissly). After each of the pairs has had its say, there is a brass choir interlude, after which each pair returns with a more embellished account with increased instrumentation.
Taken as a whole, Salonen’s accounts of both Nielsen and Bartók made a convincing case that listening in the concert hall will always be a richer experience than listening to a recording!
No comments:
Post a Comment