New York Philharmonic Play Webern & Scriabin

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 09 April 2024 14:35

Written by Jack Angstreich

Karina Canellakis conducts the New York Philharmonic with Alice Sara Ott on piano.  Photo by Erin Baiano.

At Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall on the evening of Saturday, April 6th, I had the enormous pleasure of attending an extraordinary concert presented by the New York Philharmonic under the brilliant direction of Karina Canellakis, in her uncommonly auspicious set of debut performances with this ensemble.

The event began admirably with a very impressively executed account of Anton Webern’s challenging but compelling, superbly scored Six Pieces for Orchestra. According to the useful program note by Christopher H. Gibbs (who is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College and co-author, with Richard Taruskin, of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition):

Webern composed the initial version of Six Pieces for Orchestra in the summer of 1909, using as a model Schoenberg's recent Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, and offering the dedication: “To Arnold Schoenberg, my teacher and friend, with greatest love.” 

He adds:

He revised the pieces in 1928, writing to Schoenberg: “Everything extravagant is now cut (alto flute, six trombones for a few measures, and so on).” In a later program note he said that the new version, heard on this concert, “is to be considered the only valid one.”

Webern wrote to Schoenberg before the premiere, saying that:

The first piece is to express my frame of mind when I was still in Vienna, already sensing the disaster, yet always maintaining the hope that I would find my mother still alive. It was a beautiful day — for a minute I believed quite firmly that nothing had happened. Only during the train ride to Carinthia — it was on the afternoon of the same day — did I learn the truth. The third piece conveys the impression of the fragrance of the Erica, which I gathered at a spot in the forest very meaningful to me and then laid on the bier. The fourth piece I later entitled marcia funebre. Even today I do not understand my feelings as I walked behind the coffin to the cemetery.

The composer also “provided the following explanation of the pieces for a German music festival in 1933”:

They represent short song forms, in that they are mostly tripartite. Thematic relations do not exist, not even within the individual pieces. I consciously avoided such connections, since I aimed at an always changing mode of expression. To describe briefly the character of the pieces (they are of a purely lyrical nature): the first expresses the expectation of a calamity; the second the certainty of its fulfillment; the third the most tender contrast — it is, so to speak, the introduction to the fourth, a funeral march; five and six are an epilogue: remembrance and resignation.

The individual movements of the work themselves somewhat deny my powers of description so I shall rest content here with Webern’s commentary quoted above.

The proceedings continued excitingly with a marvelous rendition of Richard Strauss’s magnificent, neo-Wagnerian, and highly dramatic tone poem, Death and Transfiguration, Op. 24. Annotator James M. Keller records that, “In 1895 Strauss acquiesced to a friend's request to provide an explanation of the piece's action”:

The sick man lies in a bed asleep, breathing heavily and irregularly; agreeable dreams charm a smile onto his features in spite of his suffering; his sleep becomes lighter; he wakens; once again he is racked by terrible pain, his limbs shake with fever — as the attack draws to a close and the pain resumes, the fruit of his path through life appears to him, the idea, the Ideal which he has tried to realize, to represent in his art, but which he has been unable to perfect because it was not for any human being to perfect it. The hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body, in order to find perfected in the most glorious form in the eternal cosmos that which he could not fulfill here on earth.

The second half of the evening was also memorable, starting with an exceptionally accomplished realization of Maurice Ravel’s awesome Piano Concerto in G Major, dazzlingly played—in another amazing debut with the orchestra—by the meteoric Alice Sara Ott, who was dressed in a fabulous, sparkling, silver-white gown. About the composer, Keller records that: 

As early as 1906, he reported that he had begun sketching a piano concerto on Basque themes, provisionally titled Zazpiak-Bat, and in 1913 he informed his friend Igor Stravinsky that he was refocusing his attention on it. But in late 1914 Ravel, by then installed in the south of France due to the disruptions of World War I, wrote to his student and colleague Roland-Manuel that he had to give up work on the piece since he had left his sketches behind in Paris. And that was the end of it, except that some material from the project was reworked when Ravel came to write his G-major Piano Concerto. 

To the critic M.D. Calvocoressi, Ravel called it “a concerto in the truest sense of the word: I mean that it is written very much in the same spirit as those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns.” He continued:

The music of a concerto should, in my opinion, be lighthearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or at dramatic effects. It has been said of certain classics that their concertos were written not “for” but “against” the piano. I heartily agree. I had intended to title this concerto “Divertissement.” Then it occurred to me that there was no need to do so because the title “Concerto” should be sufficiently clear. 

The initial, virtuosic Allegramente movement is ebullient and jazzy with some moody passages, strongly recalling the music of George Gershwin, and ends forcefully. The exquisite Adagio assai begins with a long, introspective introduction for solo piano; the movement becomes more lyrical with the entry of the orchestra and continues to build in intensity. The propulsive and spirited Presto finale is another showcase for piano technique; the composer’s affinities with Igor Stravinsky—in the latter’s early phase—are at their most pronounced here. Exuberant applause elicited a terrific encore from the soloist, Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina from 1976—the Ravel concerto appeared almost sheerly profligate beside this minimal work.

The night concluded stunningly with a thrilling version of Alexander Scriabin’s glorious The Poem of Ecstasy, Op. 54. The composer’s own program note for “a performance in Moscow shortly after the Russian premiere,” is gnomic and confounding:

Le Poème de l'extase is the Joy of Liberated Action. The Cosmos, i.e. Spirit, is Eternal Creation without External Motivation, a Divine Play with Worlds. The Creative Spirit, i.e. the Universe at Play, is not conscious of the Absoluteness of its creativeness, having subordinated itself to a Finality and made creativity a means towards an end. The stronger the pulse-beat of life and the more the precipitation of rhythms, the more clearly the awareness comes to the Spirit that it is consubstantial with creativity, immanent within itself, and that its life is a play. When the Spirit has attained the supreme culmination of its activity and has been torn away from the embraces of teleology and relativity, when it has exhausted completely its substance and its liberated active energy, the Time of Ecstasy shall then arrive. 

Scriabin told his friend Ivan Lipaev, “When you listen to Ecstasy, look straight into the eye of the sun!” In 1909, Sergei Prokofiev interestingly remarked about the work that: 

Both the harmonic and the thematic material, and the voice-leading in the counterpoint, were completely new. Basically, Scriabin was trying to find new foundations for harmony. The principles he discovered were very interesting, but in proportion to their complexity they were like a stone tied to Scriabin's neck, hindering his invention as regards melody and (chiefly) the movement of voices. Nonetheless, Le Poème de l'extase was probably his most successful work, since all the elements in his manner of composing were apparently balanced. But it was hard to imagine, at first hearing, just what he was trying to do. 

In one of his notebooks, Scriabin inscribed the following poem, which served as the basis for The Poem of Ecstasy:

The Spirit
Winged by the thirst for life,
Takes flight
On the heights of negation.
There in the rays of his dream
Arises a magic world
Of marvelous images and feelings.     
The Spirit playing.     
The Spirit longing.
The Spirit with fancy creating all,
Surrenders himself to the bliss of love. …
I call you to life, mysterious forces!
Drowned in the obscure depths
Of the creative spirit, timid
Embryos of life, to you I bring audacity! …

With the piece’s astonishing and exalting close, the audience delivered an enthusiastic ovation.