New York Philharmonic Perform Romantic Classics

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 03 February 2025 15:01

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee.

At Lincoln Center’s excellent David Geffen Hall—on the night of Wednesday, January 29th—I had the exceptional privilege to attend an outstanding concert presented by the New York Philharmonic under the confident direction of Marek Janowski, who debuted with the ensemble with these performances.

The event started enjoyably with Carl Maria von Weber’s seldom played Overture to The Ruler of the Spirits from 1811. In a note on the program, Edward Downes and James M. Keller provided some useful background on the piece:

Carl Maria von Weber spent much of his career in the orbit of the stage. He served as music director at a succession of civic and court theaters and opera houses, earning high marks for his work at Breslau (1804–06), at Duke Eugen Friedrich of Württemberg's castle at Karlsruhe in Upper Silesia (1806–07), in Prague (where he headed the German Opera Company from 1813 to 1816), and in Dresden (where, at the King of Saxony's behest, he oversaw the German Opera Theater from 1817 to 1821). 

Although some of Weber's instrumental works remain in the repertoire today, it was as a composer of opera that Weber made his most enduring mark. He worked on ten of them in his too-brief life (he died several months before his 40th birthday), in addition to which he produced more than two dozen contributions of incidental music for theatrical productions, ranging from single items (such as a chorus for an 1813 production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) to multimovement scores comprising vocal solos, choruses, and instrumental numbers. Not all of his operas were completed, and not everything he did complete seems to have survived. Four of them — Abu Hassan, Der Freischütz, Euryanthe, and Oberon — remain at least marginally in the public's awareness today, and Der Freischütz is honored as a true classic. 

As a dazzlingly gifted 17-year-old, Weber was appointed conductor of the Breslau Opera, where he made many enemies, especially among mature musicians who had been passed up in his favor. But he also made many friends, among them the poet Johann Gottlieb Rhode. Rhode had ambitions as a dramatist, and it was not long before he offered Weber a libretto for a new opera to be called Rübezahl. Weber's overture to this projected opera eventually became the standalone concert overture you hear in this program. 

Rübezahl was notably depicted by the Romantic painter Moritz von Schwind as a gnomelike denizen of the forest. The character was a figure of German folklore: a rather Robin Hood–like ruler of spirits whose benign adventures were garbled into a thoroughly confused libretto. The teenaged Weber was not up to the task of bossing his librettist, or of shaping his own libretto, and he never finished the opera. Still, the composer thought enough of some of his music for it that he chose to incorporate it into several later works. The best material was his Overture, the original manuscript of which has been lost, except for a few bars of the first violin part. Seven years later, in 1811, stimulated probably by the prospect of an important orchestral concert he was to conduct in Munich, Weber, in his own words, “entirely reworked” his Rübezahl Overture, giving it the new title Der Beherrscher der Geister (The Ruler of the Spirits).

We no longer know which parts of the revised Overture refer to incidents in the discarded opera. It refers to a folktale that was central to the opera plot in which the ruler of the spirits is foiled in his designs on a beautiful princess. The princess has the presence of mind to steal Rübezahl's magic scepter, thus compelling him to go out into the garden and count turnips (his name has been translated as “counter of turnips”) while she makes her escape with the help of a friendly gryphon.

Later that year, Weber described it as the “most powerful and lucid thing I have yet written ... a veritable park of artillery!” 

The splendid soloist Beatrice Rana—who wore a lovely black gown—then entered the stage for a superb account of Felix Mendelssohn’s possibly underrated Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25, from 1831. (In the 1970s, the scholar William S. Newman wrote in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Mendelssohn’s two piano concertos were rapidly acquiring the status of “student concerti,” but the realization of the work on this evening demonstrated that—with respect to the first concerto, at least—such an assessment is unjust.) Keller’s commentary is again edifying:

The inspiration for Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 arrived during a visit to Italy he undertook in 1830–31, the same trip that gave rise to the Italian Symphony. The journey began with a two-week visit with Goethe in Weimar — the last time Mendelssohn saw the great poet — before the composer continued south to Munich, Pressburg, and finally Italy, where he arrived in October. Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Genoa, and Milan all delighted him, and he returned to Germany in October 1831. That's where he unveiled his G-minor Piano Concerto, on October 17, before an audience that included the King and Queen of Bavaria. Also on the program were his Symphony No. 1, his Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and some solo keyboard improvisation. It seems that Mendelssohn had been contemplating this concerto a year earlier, in November 1830, when he was still in Rome, and began sketching the piece then. But he did not focus on it until October 1831, at which point he wrote it out speedily.

The initial, Molto allegro con fuoco movement is Romantic and dramatic but is interspersed with lyrical episodes. The exquisite, ensuing Andante is also song-like—and meditative as well—and concludes softly—it owes much to the slow movements in the piano concerti of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig von Beethoven. The finale opens with characteristically Mendelssohnian fanfares—this movement too is propulsive, energetic, virtuosic and Chopinesque, although like the first it has moments of repose. Enthusiastic applause elicited a wonderful encore from Rana: the Mendelssohn Song without Words, Op. 67, No. 4.

The second half of the program was even stronger than the first: a marvelous rendition of Robert Schumann’s extraordinary Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, the Rhenish, Op. 97, from 1850. Keller’s remarks are again educative:

Robert Schumann tended to turn sequentially from genre to genre, obsessively exploring a medium until he felt he had reached the current limit of his abilities and curiosity: piano music occupied him in the 1830s, songs in 1840, chamber music in 1842, oratorio in 1843. In 1841 the orchestra enjoyed his attention. In that year alone he produced his Symphony No. 1 (Spring); his buoyant Overture, Scherzo, and Finale (essentially a symphony without a slow movement); the original version of his Symphony in D minor (which he would recast a decade later into what we know as his Symphony No. 4); and yet another symphony, in C minor, which he left as an incomplete torso. After that he eased up on symphonic music. His Symphony No. 2 waited until 1845–46, and almost another five years would pass before he embarked on his Symphony No. 3. Its subtitle, Rhenish, bears tribute to the Rhine River, the waterway of Germany's western spine. The Schumanns had moved to the Rhineland in late 1850 — to Düsseldorf, where Schumann was appointed municipal music director. 

He adds:

It is a thoroughly German work; in fact, Schumann here used German movement markings — the first time he did so in a symphony — and he crafted themes that evoked the landscape, such as the Ländler-like folk-waltz of the Scherzo movement, which he initially intended to title “Morning on the Rhine.”

And further:

Schumann once told his biographer William Joseph von Wasielewski that, in this work, “popular elements should prevail, and the result, I think, has been a success,” and in 1851 he wrote to his publisher that “here and there [this symphony] reflects a bit of local color.” The Cologne Cathedral, the Gothic crown of one of the Rhine's great cities, makes an appearance, too; the fourth movement, Schumann wrote in the symphony's manuscript, should be “like the musical accompaniment for a solemn ceremony.” Trombones, historically taken to signify things ecclesiastical, do not make their first appearance in this symphony until this fourth movement, where their mellow tones sing forth an impressive chorale right at the outset. This music stands in high contrast to the overwhelmingly cheerful, or at least bucolic, material that has preceded it, but it proves essentially integrated into the symphony, and this solemn music will be recalled even in the bustling merriment of the finale.

The initial movement, marked “Lively,” which pronouncedly anticipates—and surely greatly influenced—the symphonic music of Schumann’s celebrated disciple, Johannes Brahms, is passionate with majestic passages and finishes affirmatively. The bewitching Scherzo—with the tempo of “Very moderate”—opens gracefully and liltingly; it has fugue-like interludes and ends quietly. The third movement, marked “Not fast,” is gentle in character, charming, and relatively subdued; it closes softly. The fourth movement begins weightily and seriously and concludes on a note of gravity. The finale, also marked “Lively,” is ebullient, even exuberant, although with more stately moments—it builds to a triumphant end.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.

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