Entering the home run of their first joint US tour, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Chief Conductor Sir Simon Rattle arrived at Carnegie Hall on Thursday to present the first of their two New York concerts for the fully packed house. Enjoying their first full season working together, the orchestra and Rattle had assembled a calling card tour program based on their Munich repertoire, of which the first set focused on the music of Paul Hindemith, Alexander Zemlinsky and Gustav Mahler.
To get the evening going with befittingly mischievous preamble, Hindemith’s tongue-in-cheek homage, Ragtime (Well-Tempered) (1921) for large orchestra, was heard in riotously grooving performance. As implied by its subtitle, the music is based on the C minor fugue from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722), its material being hilariously mixed together with various brands of dance hall music, and scored for an orchestra of flute, two piccolos, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, snare drum, bass drum, xylophone and strings.
Saving Bach from his ardent worshippers, Hindemith’s four-minute piece shuns away from monumentalizing its musical godfather. Instead, the listener is reminded that it was quite natural for Bach to implement popular idioms into even his most refined music – that is to say the folk tune Cabbage and turnips have driven me away being quoted in the Goldberg Variations (1741), among other things. Thus, Hindemith’s imaginary take on Bach in the Roaring Twenties has more to it than meets the eye.
On purely musical level, the score is an uplifting affair, penned with teasing inspiration and orchestral vigor, wholeheartedly embraced by the BRSO and Rattle in their terrific Carnegie Hall performance. All too rarely heard in concert, Hindemith’s witty miniature served as cracking prelude to the evening’s more serious musical items.
The gradual rediscovery of the music of Alexander Zemlinsky over the past three decades has opened our eyes and ears to the legacy of this wonderful composer, who taught Arnold Schoenberg and whose Lyric Symphony (1922-23) Alban Berg saluted with his Lyric Suite (1925-26). In the composer’s oeuvre, the Symphonic Songs, op. 20 (1929) appear among his finest and most striking musical works. The seven-movement cycle is based on poems of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, which Zemlinsky discovered – in German translations – in the anthology Afrika Singt, set for voice and an orchestra of two flutes, piccolo, three oboes doubling English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, three bassoons doubling contrabassoon, two horns, three trumpets, there trombones, tuba, mandolin, timpani, glockenspiel, woodblock, rute, tambourine, jazz drums, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam and strings.
A peculiar mix of ingenious Austro-German expressionism and striking pieces of poetry from Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Frank Smith Horne, Zemlinsky’s song cycle should be counted among the top-tier musical settings of the twentieth century, its ever-keen vocal and instrumental mood-painting yielding to absolute mastery. Sung with commanding authority and pristine musicality by baritone Lester Lynch, the Symphonic Songs came off nothing short of revelatory, their orchestral fabric painted with riveting palette by the BRSO under Rattle.
The opening and closing songs, Lied aus Dixieland (Song of a Dark Girl) and Arabesque, plunge into the very heart of psychological and societal trauma with their unassumingly graphic musical portrayals of lynchings. The theme of loss is picked up again in the third number, Totes braunes Mädel (A Brown Girl), its darkly meditative music being among the most moving in the entire cycle. Keeping up with overall symmetry, the fifth movement, Erkenntnis, contemplates upon quiet disillusionment, true to its title. Serving as evocative interludes, perhaps, the second and fourth songs, Lied der Baumwollpacker (Cotton Song) and Afrikanische Tanz (Danse Africaine) combine folk-like verse with aphoristic snapshots to enthralling effect, their emotional impact amplified by Zemlinsky’s pristine orchestral effects. Lingering at the heart of the cycle, Übler Bursche (Bad Man) focuses of the complex nature of human evil within a society.
As demonstrated by Lynch and the Rattle-led BRSO, Zemlinsky’s intricate songs encapsulate some of the most painful societal issues in formidable musical garments. No wonder their fate was to become categorized as Entartete Musik by the Nazi regime. In today’s troubling political climate, their message deserves to be heard far and wide.
Composed in 1903-04 and revised in 1906, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor is one of the most expansive takes on the genre in the repertoire. Cast in four movements, the ca. eighty-minute symphonic edifice calls forth a vast orchestra of four flutes, piccolo, four oboes, English horn, three clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, four bassoons, contrabassoon, eight horns, six trumpets, four trombones, tuba, two sets of timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, triangle, cowbells, hammer, tam-tam, rute, bells, glockenspiel, xylophone, two harps, celesta and full strings.
In context of Mahler’s other symphonic endeavors, the Sixth Symphony appears as gravitational center, following a trajectory tied not only to the two symphonies framing it within the composer’s “central trilogy”, but also echoing the wide purgatorial panoramas of the Second Symphony (1888-94/1895-1910) and gazing forward to the disillusionment and resignation of the last symphonies.
The ca. twenty-four-minute Allegro energico, ma non troppo. Heftig, aber markig first movement stems from a menacing march subject, persistent throughout the sonata arch, juxtaposed with dark-hued chorale segment and a heatedly lyrical melody often assumed to represent the composer’s wife Alma Mahler. Entering into some nocturnal realm of dream and nightmare, the movement’s dramaturgy builds upon clashes in mood, texture and orchestration, its vehemence being contrasted by contemplative sections of dark pastoral, with offstage cowbells embedded – Reveries and Passions à la Berlioz, perhaps. After much toil and unrest, the movement literally bursts into its climatic coda, an earth-shaking final rendition of the Alma theme.
The order of the two inner movements, an Andante moderato and a Scherzo marked Wuchtig, famously caused Mahler much trouble, as he went back and forth between his first and second thoughts in performance practice and published musical text alike. An unanswered question, perhaps, rooted in the ambiguities within the material itself, both Andante-Scherzo and Scherzo-Andante have their merits and defects, as demonstrated by different concert takes and recordings alike. Intelligibly paced, both solutions can lead to satisfying results, presenting us with different perspectives on the overall dramaturgy of the symphony.
As ever with Rattle-led performances, the Carnegie Hall outing segued with the fourteen-minute Andante. Here woodwinds, horns and strings come to the fore, introducing and developing the achingly autumnal material, conjuring up elegiac vistas of sorrow-tinged solace, before the symphony plunges into its diabolical Scherzo. Danse macabre of sorts, the movement re-establishes the somber mood of the opening march, adding some sardonic commentary to the fabric, to bone-chilling effect.
Mahler’s humongous, thirty-minute Sostenuto – Allegro moderato – Allegro energico finale comes off as hair-raising panorama of the wasteland of the dead, only this time, unlike in the Second Symphony, there will be no resurrection. The music does try to climb over the mount of Purgatory – three times – only to be thrown deeper into the abyss. Laid to waste by two shattering hammer blows, the music summons what power it has left for its bold final attempt but is beheaded by massive restatement of the first movement’s orchestral guillotine, followed by hollow silence.
Performed with all those gripping, tearing, achingly lyrical and downright nightmarish colors embedded by the BRSO and Rattle, the symphony was given a reading that penetrated every level of one’s musical psyche, grabbing the listener on shoulders and piercing their very soul. Rarely – if ever – had there been such kaleidoscopic array of instrumental detail present in concert outings of this music as delivered of Thursday. The expressive scope of the performance was something quite unusual among all too many Mahler-fatigued readings sounded out these days.
Drawing from the BRSO’s exquisite Mahler tradition, rooted in the Kubelík era, combined with Rattle’s full-measure understanding of the composer’s idiom, the Carnegie Hall performance was a transformative experience, combining technical virtuosity with dramatic mastery. Being there in the hall was truly a privilege.
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Sir Simon Rattle, conductor
Lester Lynch, baritone
Paul Hindemith: Ragtime (Well-Tempered) (1921) for large orchestra
Alezander Zemlinsky: Symphonische Gesänge, op. 20 (1929) for baritone and orchestra
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 6 in A minor (1903-04/1906) for large orchestra
Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
Thursday 2 May, 8 pm
© Jari Kallio
AIM - Adventures in Music 
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