Schoenfield, Poulenc, and Dvořák: Gerard Schwarz, cond., Scott Goff, flute, Melvyn Poll, tenor, Joseph Adam, organ, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 21.6.2007 (BJ)

 

Paul Schoenfield’s Klezmer Rondos, for flute, tenor, and chamber orchestra, and Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto made a stimulating juxtaposition for the first half of this program. Both works contain much enjoyable music. Klezmer Rondos, written in 1989 when its Detroit-born composer was 42 and later revised and expanded, is a rich mix of folk inflexions suggestive of Bartók, but as much the product of Jewish as of Hungarian or Slavic traditions; rhythmic quirks that evoke Bartók again, but Stravinsky more particularly; and a taste for helter-skelter tempos and incisive woodwind articulations that bids fair to out-Shostakovich Shostakovich. Beside these echoes, moreover, are vernacular Jewish elements of still deeper ancestral resonance and wider popular appeal. Poulenc is a much less eclectic composer, but his concerto too brings together disparate strands, in this case including the influence of the 19th-century French grand-organ tradition, ritualistic ostinato figures that once again suggest Stravinsky, and a sort of generalized neo-classicism expressed through smooth, sweet (even saccharine) violin lines.

One feature that made Gerard Schwarz’s decision to program the two pieces together a revealing one is their shared predilection for rhythmically propulsive moving basses played by the lower strings. Less positively, it must be said that both works are impaired by certain fundamental aesthetic problems, though the problems are different in each instance. Klezmer Rondos flies in the face of the principle memorably stated years ago by Sir Donald Tovey in his Essays in Musical Analysis: that once you have introduced the human voice into a piece, any purely instrumental music that follows is bound to be anticlimactic. Schoenfield introduced into the center of what is essentially a kind of flute concerto a song written in Yiddish theater style and based on the poem Mirele by Michl Virth, on this occasion sung as to the manner born by Melvyn Poll. In the outlying sections of the piece, Scott Goff tossed his frequently vertiginous flute flights off with dazzling virtuosity, though occasionally covered by the orchestra, which was also having a deal of fun with its exuberant shenanigans. But Tovey’s principle ensured that the part of the work after the vocal incursion seemed a bit beside the point, and whole idea of inserting a plaintive song into the middle of a flute concerto failed to make structural sense at least for this listener.

The trouble with the Poulenc Organ Concerto is that the effect of a solo concerto depends ultimately on the humanly fascinating spectacle of unequal forces conversing in such a way that the sheer power of an orchestra (the group, or society) is trumped by the personal qualities – not merely virtuosity, but imagination, intensity, poetry, lyricism, rhetorical force, you name it – that a soloist (the individual) can bring to bear on the colloquy. That effect is only really satisfying if the individual in question clearly could not prevail just by drowning out the orchestra through sheer weight of tone, but a modern organ, unlike the chamber-scaled organ of Handel’s time, can do that easily. The conversation between a big modern instrument like Benaroya Hall’s organ and even the largest orchestral forces, let alone Poulenc’s strings and timpani, consequently takes on a certain artificiality: we hear the orchestra whenever the organ deigns to let it be heard, but we hear the organ whenever it chooses. The difference between this concerto and the other famous big French organ-and-orchestra work, Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony, is that Saint-Saëns had the wit to avoid the concerto concept, and cast his piece instead in a form that does not posit a contrast in the physical scale of the performing forces. Again, I had no quarrel with the quality of the performance, in which the Seattle Symphony’s resident organist, Joseph Adam, pulled out all the appropriate stops with gusto and brilliance, seconded by elegant playing from the strings and by Michael Crusoe’s incisive contributions on the timpani. In sum, this was a highly professional realization of a slightly silly concept.

No such stricture can be leveled against the work that concluded the program, the Eighth Symphony of Dvořák. This may not be the composer’s greatest work in the genre. That title surely belongs to the Seventh Symphony – though I have to confess that my personal favorite is the Sixth, which we hear too infrequently. But second-level Dvořák is already one level higher than even the best work of any ordinary composer, and the cornucopia of ravishing melody, gorgeous orchestral color, and rhythmic ingenuity that characterizes this unpretentious symphony, with its alternations of pastoral nostalgia, playful humor, and somewhat raucous jubilation, drew a response of wonderful grace, flexibility, and enthusiasm from Schwarz and his orchestra. I felt, in the subtly shaped trio section of the third movement, that a drier sonority could have allowed the off-beat punctuations under the tune more scope (listen to this passage in Colin Davis’s superb 1978 recording with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and you will hear what I mean). But in every other respect I thought this Seattle performance was what that great composer-critic Virgil Thomson would have called “the berries.”

 

Bernard Jacobson