Lost Classics With The Philadelphia Orchestra

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 02 November 2022 15:10

Written by Jack Angstreich

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra. Photo by Jennifer Taylor.

At Carnegie Hall, on the evening of Friday, October 28th, I had the great privilege to attend a terrific concert featuring the superb musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra under the exhilarating direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

The event began with its greatest work, a ravishing presentation of Maurice Ravel’s glorious Le tombeau de Couperin. Paul J. Horsley in a program note provides some useful background:

The concept of the tombeau, or “homage-piece,” dates back many centuries. French composers of the 17th century commonly wrote sets of chamber or keyboard pieces—which they calledtombeaux(literally “tombs”) or occasionallyapothéoses—to pay musical tribute to a dead colleague.

He adds:

Couperin himself (1668–1733) wrote sets of homage-pieces, too, including apothéoses for two early Baroque masters, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Arcangelo Corelli. Ravel’s set of pieces thus paid tribute not only to a French master, but also to a distinctly French tradition of musical tribute. At the same time, the work took on another dimension related specifically to the war: Each of the six piano movements is dedicated to a friend or colleague lost on the battlefield.

And:

Pianist Marguerite Long, who later was to play the premiere of the composer’s G-Major Piano Concerto, presented the first performances of the piano version of the Tombeau in Paris on April 11, 1919. As he often did with his keyboard works, Ravel created orchestrations of four of the six, which were performed in Paris in February 1920 and made into a very popular ballet by the Swedish Ballet the same year.

The Prélude that opens the piece is sprightly, if not entirely so, whereas in the ensuing, dance-like Forlane, the emotional undercurrents move more strongly to the fore. The Menuet that follows is more lyrical, with an elegiac quality, while its Trio is more somber and meditative. The closing Rigaudon is the most energetic movement, with a quieter more plaintive section.

The remainder of the first half of the concert consisted of a confident account of Florence Price’s wonderful Symphony No. 3. About the composer, program annotator John Michael Cooper writes: “Her First Symphony remained unpublished until 2008, her Second Symphony is missing, and her Fourth Symphony (1945) went unperformed in her lifetime and unpublished until 2020.” About the Third Symphony, he adds:

It was performed by Valter Poole and the Michigan WPA Symphony Orchestra on November 6 and 8, 1940. Those performances were a success, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reported enthusiastically on the work in her syndicated newspaper column,My Day.

And: “It was not heard again in her lifetime and remained unperformed until 2001 and unpublished until 2008.” Price described the work as “a cross section of present-day Negro life and thought with its heritage of that which is past, paralleled or influenced by concepts of the present day,” which Cooper glosses as “a reference to the Third Symphony’s cultivation of dissonant passages, jarring percussion, and other Modernist expressive devices that were absent from the First Symphony but central to 20th-century music in general, and to much of Price’s later music.”

The opening movement is agitated—contrasting both a with slower section seemingly influenced by Negro spirituals and ‘populist’ music in a jauntier vein—but it eventually unfolds into a grander statement. The succeeding Andante ma non troppo, which is more cheerful for much of its length, is the purest Americana, and the Juba:Allegrois ebullient, with the strongest connection to popular music of all the movements, while theScherzo: Finaleis tumultuous but ultimately triumphant.

After intermission, the impressive soloist Beatrice Rana, who wore a sparkling—indeed dazzling—dress, entered the stage to admirably perform Clara Wieck-Schumann’s underrated Piano Concerto. In a useful note for the program, Christopher H. Gibbs comments on the composer:

She began writing her ambitious Piano Concerto, Op. 7, in late 1832 or early 1833 at age 14 and premiered the piece with Felix Mendelssohn conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in November 1835. It is her only surviving orchestral composition. The few works she wrote after her marriage tended to be occasional pieces, usually birthday and Christmas gifts, although in 1846 she produced her magnificent Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17. Following Robert’s death, when she was 37, she only wrote one minor piece, a march. Her intense musical activities continued as she went on performing, teaching, tending to her husband’s legacy, and being Brahms’s principal adviser.

He adds:

It is unclear who orchestrated the first movement (the orchestra does not play in the second), but the instrumentation there is generally quite modest, usually scored just for strings, or entirely absent. Clara performed the concerto across Europe many times in the years to follow, fulfilling her hope that it would please audiences and be in demand. 

The opening Allegro maestoso was exuberant and, like the work as a whole, an expression of full-blown Romanticism. Gibbs remarks on the inward and song-like middle movement that “It is initially for piano alone until a solo cello joins for an extended duet,” here ably performed by Hai-Ye Ni. The Finale recapitulates theethosof the first movement with even greater drama.

The concert concluded thrillingly with a mesmerizing version of Ravel’s fabulous Boléro. According to Horsley, “Ravel said later that he wanted to write a piece that had ‘no form, properly speaking, and no modulation, or almost none—just rhythm and orchestra.’” The composer described it as “a piece lasting 17 minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral effects without music—one long and very gradual crescendo.”

The musicians received a very enthusiastic, standing ovation.

• < Prev
• Next >