SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL CONCERT  REVIEW
 

Wagner and Mendelssohn: Gerard Schwarz, cond., Christine Goerke and Holli Harrison, sopranos, Vinson Cole, tenor, Seattle Symphony, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 17.6.2010 (BJ)

When Roy Harris failed to complete his new symphony in time for the scheduled premiere at a concert I attended many years ago, so that we were treated to just a couple of movements instead of the whole thing, John Edwards, the distinguished executive director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in those days, sidled up to me during intermission and delivered himself of the memorable line, “It just goes to prove the truth of the old saying–half a loaf is better than one.” There is hardly a work of that is truer than Wagner’s Parsifal. Having been taken to a performance of this supposedly Christian music drama by his mother when he was seventeen, Spike Hughes observed in his autobiography: “I fell asleep several times during the performance of this revolting work, which lasts twice as long as Holy Week and Lent put together.”

Parsifal’s morbid odor of sanctity, freighted with mystical symbolism, is a fragrance from which my critical nostrils, like Hughes’s, recoil. In view of all this, I could only regard the excerpts that opened this program–two preludes and the “Good Friday Spell”–as something of a mercy. Such passages can be enjoyed even by listeners repelled by Wagner’s unremitting self-glorification and by such plot elements as Amfortas’s suppurating wound. While “Monsieur Wagner,” as Rossini memorably observed, “has fine moments but bad quarter-hours,” this particular half-hour contains much beauty, which Gerard Schwarz and his Seattle Symphony realized with luxuriant tone and eloquent phrasing. Wagner is, of course, easy game for satire. But whereas Edgar Wilson Nye, quoted by Mark Twain, remarked that “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” I would beg leave to suggest that the opposite is true. The music sounded gorgeous, but the substance fell far short of the surface glitter.

There was an agreeably seditious mischievousness about the combination of composers Schwarz had put together for this concert. Wagner and Mendelssohn: the man who declared that Jews couldn’t write worthwhile music, and the Jew who wrote it.

His origins notwithstanding, Mendelssohn was a better Christian than Wagner. Felix’s family had actually converted to Christianity when he was a boy, though this did not exonerate him in Wagner’s eyes any more than it would have done a century later in Hitler’s. His Second Symphony, Lobgesang (Song of Praise), is one of those Mendelssohn works that incorporate elements from the Protestant tradition. Among them is Nun danket alle Gott (Now let all give thanks to God), a Lutheran chorale whose tune dates back to the early 17th century.

It was Mendelssohn’s magical setting of this that provided the most satisfying moment of the evening. His harmonization and scoring attain to a simple yet compelling intensity that rival similar achievements in Bach, whose St. Matthew Passion Mendelssohn had rescued from oblivion a few years before he wrote this hybrid symphony-cantata. Joseph Crnko’s Seattle Symphony Chorale sang it, and indeed the entire work, with skill and ardor.

The Song of Praise is the sort of one-off piece that Schwarz delights in exploring. He managed to find much more variety in the music’s alternations of rhetoric and lyricism than I have heard in other performances, and the conviction he and the orchestra brought to it compensated sufficiently for textures and ensemble that were not always lucid or unfailingly precise. Of the two excellent soprano soloists, Christine Goerke’s voice was the more incisive, Holli Harrison’s the more caressing, but they blended well in their duet, and for the tenor solos it was a pleasure to welcome Vinson Cole back to the city where he used to teach. With a voice that has darkened in recent years, he covered the role’s range from fervor to inward lyricism with a fine sense of poetry.

Bernard Jacobson

NB: part of this review appeared also in the Seattle Times