{"id":2216,"date":"2011-07-28T18:18:55","date_gmt":"2011-07-28T22:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=2216"},"modified":"2011-10-11T00:47:22","modified_gmt":"2011-10-11T04:47:22","slug":"strange-bedfellows-bruckner-and-adams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=2216","title":{"rendered":"Strange Bedfellows: Bruckner and Adams"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Sedgwick Clark<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mahler and Bruckner were once considered the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of composers. Today, Mahler cycles are a dime a dozen, but Bruckner remains a harder sell. Critics snickered when Cleveland Orchestra Music Director Franz Welser-M\u00f6st maintained at a press conference last year that Bruckner was the musical granddaddy of John Adams and minimalism in general. As it turned out, the two composers made surprisingly simpatico concert partners at Lincoln Center Festival\u2019s \u201cBruckner: (R)evolution\u201d with the Cleveland two weeks ago. Adams stated in the program book that \u201cBruckner, from a very early age, spoke to me.\u201d And despite Fisher Hall\u2019s empty balcony, the wild standing ovations made one wonder if Bruckner\u2019s time has come at last.<\/p>\n

Some moments of stridency aside, the Clevelanders sounded gorgeous in Fisher, where they haven\u2019t played for some 30 years. Lincoln Center execs and a few audience members floated the notion at intermission that perhaps the hall didn\u2019t need altering after all. (Dream on, friends.) Word was that W-M liked the hall and felt that one need only hold back the brass and battery a smidgen. Sorry, gang, that only resulted in muffled timpani and tentative brass attacks here and there in the Bruckners; textures in the Adams works, on the other hand, were transparent as could be.<\/p>\n

The lightweight, hasty Bruckner recordings made by W-M several years ago for EMI, were happily effaced by these solidly traditional readings. Especially welcome was his cogent sense of structure in music that easily descends into stop-and-go patchwork. Many conductors further sectionalize the works by inserting unmarked cadential ritards. W-M also, more than most, gave full value to the composer\u2019s famed pauses. Rarely have Bruckner symphonies seemed so logical.<\/p>\n

That said, rarely has Bruckner seemed so poker-faced. One prayed in vain for a slight expansion of the phrase, but the deeply emotional, spiritual depth of the music had to be recollected from other performances. W-M\u2019s dutiful conducting of the Fifth Symphony on opening night (7\/13) was short on character, expressiveness, and, believe it or not, playfulness. The droll tango-like dance at rehearsal letter F in the first movement, the impetuous Scherzo, and the perky solo clarinet statement of the fugue motive in the finale, were hopelessly flatfooted. Yes, Bruckner skeptics, the composer actually had a sense of humor! (So did the Minnesota Orchestra, according to the orchestra\u2019s long-time observer Dennis Rooney, whose members so detested their conductor\u2019s interpretation of the Fifth that they made up a rude lyric to the fugue subject, below: \u201cF–k you, Skrowacewski, you can shove it up your ass right now!\u201d)<\/p>\n

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\nOnce one accepted W-M\u2019s interpretive approach — more akin to Beethoven than to Wagner — the subsequent Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth were more easily appreciated, even if one recalled more moving performances in the past. Indeed, apart from a less-than-demonic Scherzo, W-M\u2019s Ninth was quite impressive. Such details as his well-judged tenuto in the first movement to allow the solo clarinet in letters G and V to make its poetic point and the lambent loveliness of the forte strings at L in the finale demonstrated an eminently sensitive Brucknerian.<\/p>\n

For me, the Eighth Symphony (7\/16) was the high point of W-M\u2019s Bruckner performances. He elected to perform its original 1887 version and has declared it to be \u201cthe best view of Bruckner\u2019s true vision for this symphony,\u201d according to Cleveland Orchestra program annotator Eric Sellen. <\/em>Other than scholars and critics, however, I\u2019d be surprised if many audience members were even aware or cared about which version was used.<\/p>\n

Briefly, Bruckner had a lot of second thoughts about his music. According to the British musicologist Deryck Cooke in his c. 1970 essay, \u201cThe Bruckner Problem Simplified,\u201d no less than 34 different scores for the nine symphonies exist in the composer\u2019s own hand and those of others. Only the Fifth (which was never performed in his lifetime) and Sixth (of which only the second and third movements were performed in his lifetime) are free of such intervention. Compounding The Bruckner Problem, an article in the Times <\/em>on July 10 by Benjamin Korstvedt debunks the long-reigning British Bruckner scholars led by Cooke and Robert Simpson, and by extension American critics who have followed them in lockstep. His book on the Eighth in the superb Cambridge Music Handbooks series is necessary reading for all Brucknerites.<\/p>\n

There are two modern editions of the Eighth, by Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak, both based on Bruckner\u2019s 1890 revision. The controversial Haas reinstates 50 bars from the 1887 original, which to my ears provides smoother transitions and breadth, but scholars and many conductors reject it. Hearing the Eighth in the original 1887 version after years of acquaintance with these two editions is positively surreal. While the music\u2019s basic thrust was the same in 1887, continuity suffers throughout due to inferior voice leading and orchestration; the quiet ending of the revision is incomparably superior to the grotesque 30 bars of fortissimo in 1887; the Scherzo is substantially different, with a quite inferior Trio; repetitions continue to sometimes laughable lengths; the elongated climax of the third movement is far less focused and effective; the fortissimo of the last-movement coda is jarringly interrupted by fussy changes in dynamics. That W-M could seriously prefer the 1887 version over Bruckner\u2019s 1890 revision or Haas\u2019s expert conflation of the two is hard to believe. But we can thank him for his clear, musicianly performance — far superior to the Inbal and Tintner recordings of the original — because it settled forever in my mind that Bruckner\u2019s first thoughts were drastically in need of revision.<\/p>\n

And what about John Adams?<\/p>\n

I confess I haven\u2019t always found myself in agreement with my colleagues\u2019 praise. Of the old Glass-Reich-Adams trio of minimalists, Adams has moved the most into the mainstream. I can\u2019t help being distracted when a composer\u2019s influences are so apparent, even if the strongest is Stravinsky. The attractive 20-minute Guide to Strange Places <\/em>(2001), on the opening concert, bustled innocently at the beginning like Petrushka<\/em>\u2019s Shrovetide Fair before settling into less comfortable resonances of Copland\u2019s dissonant Organ Symphony.<\/p>\n

Leila Josefowicz seemed an ideal soloist in the composer\u2019s Violin Concerto (1993), but after three hearings of the piece I despair of ever agreeing with its champions. Its whiffs of Szymanowski, Prokofiev, and Barber in the outer movements are never as distinctive as the originals, and the slow Chaconne was both shapeless and faceless. Just what is <\/em>Adams\u2019s voice, anyway? Curiously, the end of the last-movement Toccare<\/em> petered out with a most ineffectual thud. Sure couldn\u2019t say that of the Bruckner Seventh, which followed.<\/p>\n

To my astonishment, I was blown away by Adams\u2019s Doctor Atomic Symphony<\/em>. Okay, like the opera, it opens with one of his cheekiest ripoffs: Carl Ruggles\u2019s Sun Treader<\/em>. But it works — boy, does it work! I had heard the world premiere with the BBC Symphony, conducted by the composer at London\u2019s Proms in 2007; at 40 meandering minutes, it was not ready for prime time. The next year I saw the Met production and subsequent PBS broadcast of the complete opera and couldn\u2019t hack more than an act of either. At some point, Adams slashed 15 minutes from the Symphony version. Thus tightened to 25 minutes (the same length as that other powerhouse symphony-from-an-opera, Hindemith\u2019s Mathis der Maler<\/em>) and liberated from Peter Sellars\u2019s unsingable, unintelligible libretto, one was able to concentrate on Adams\u2019s music for the first time. David Robertson led a fine performance at Carnegie with the Saint Louis Symphony and recorded it for Nonesuch, paired with Guide to Strange Places<\/em>. Who would have thought that Franz Welser-M\u00f6st would efface them all with a performance of humbling emotional commitment and a trumpet soloist, Michael Sachs, singing the vocal line of Oppenheimer\u2019s first-act aria with surpassing beauty? Doctor Atomic Symphony <\/em>was the revelation of LC\u2019s Bruckner: (R)evolution.<\/p>\n

Adams was present for each performance, smiling broadly. Who wouldn\u2019t be thrilled hearing his music conducted with such care and played with such orchestral sheen?\u00a0As to whether he is\u00a0a musical descendent of Bruckner, the jury remains out.<\/p>\n

As Time Goes By<\/strong><\/p>\n

America\u2019s favorite Hollywood classic, Casablanca<\/em>, will be shown at Saratoga tonight (Thursday, 7\/28) with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing the immortal Max Steiner\u2019s music and encored at Wolf Trap, down D.C. way, on Saturday, 7\/30, with the National Symphony. On September 8 and 9 the New York Philharmonic under David Newman (grandson of noted Hollywood composer Alfred Newman) will play Leonard Bernstein\u2019s greatest hit, West Side Story<\/em>, as the film is projected at Avery Fisher Hall.<\/p>\n

This merging of superb film music and live orchestra performance was the inspired brainchild, some 20 years ago, of Lincoln Center\u2019s master of video (Live from Lincoln Center)<\/em>, John Goberman. His initial venture was Prokofiev\u2019s Alexander Nevsky<\/em>, perhaps the best film score ever written and almost certainly the worst recorded one. He\u2019s done The Wizard of Oz<\/em> (why not in New York?!!), Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho<\/em> on Halloween, scenes from R&H musicals, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.<\/p>\n

So, John, how about The Big Country<\/em>, North by Northwest<\/em>, King Kong<\/em>, The Magnificent Seven<\/em>, The Adventures of Robin Hood<\/em>, Lawrence of Arabia<\/em>, Ben-Hur<\/em>, and How the West Was Won <\/em>. . . and, of course, Gone With the Wind<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Name your tune!<\/p>\n

Looking Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n

My week\u2019s scheduled concerts:<\/p>\n

7\/28 Alice Tully\u00a0Hall. Royal Danish Orchestra\/Michael Sch\u00f8nwandt. Nielsen: Pan and Syrinx<\/em>; Clarinet Concerto. Stravinsky: Pulcinella<\/em>.<\/p>\n