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| Gustavo Dudamel conducting the BSO (photo: Hillary Scott) |
Mention the name of Venezuelan-born Conductor Gustavo
Dudamel and immediately the name of Disney (Hall) in Los Angeles
comes to mind, where, as music director of the L A. Philharmonic, he
most often accomplishes the magic he and the late Walt both share.
(He is also the principal conductor of the Gottenburg Symphony in
Sweden). When it was first announced that he would be coming to
conduct the BSO this spring, audiences were eager to learn what
repertoire the wunderkind would be including for his
much-in-demand visit in these parts. Given the time of year, what
could possibly be more appropriate and timely than a program that
features two seasonally inspired masterworks, Robert Schumann's
Symphony No.1 (“Spring”) and Igor Stravinsky's The
Rite of Spring? And how clever was it to balance diametrically
opposed portrayals of the birth of the season, one vernal, the other
infernal?
Schumann's Symphony No.1 in B-flat, Opus 38, heard
the sound of daybreak in March 1841 after a swift (less than a month)
spell of first sketching and then composing, conducted in Leipzig by
none other than Felix Mendelssohn, with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. As
is mentioned in the BSO program notes, it was a time when a
cornucopia of compositions in European music included such composers
as Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Verdi, Wagner and Mendelsshon, finally
forming in music for the first time an intentional reflection of the
Romantic Movement so prevalent at the time in the other arts.
Beethoven's music influenced the Romantic composers' new styles
with its freedom to put aside the conventional narrative using a more
structured and confined form. Still, Schumann
produced an orchestral sonority, which later writers found overly
composed and thick, and which may have reflected the eventual view of
the entire era rather than a critique of the composer himself.
In the case of his “Spring” work, it can be heard as a
wake-up call that mankind (and womankind) encounter every spring,
each time as though it were the first. Schumann based this piece on
two Bottger poems, first identifying segments by name, a practice he
eventually dropped. His dominating methodology was restating and
expanding motifs; in this symphony his independent poetic codas
balanced by an operatic finale seem to be aimed toward each listener
independently. Sadly this was mirrored in the intensity in his life
which ultimately led to madness and final days in an asylum.
Igor
Fedorovich Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps or
The Rite of Spring
was commissioned by none other than famed impresario Sergei Diaghilev and
first performed in Paris by the Russian Ballet in 1913. The first BSO
performance was not until 1924. It was not Stravinsky's first
composition for Diaghilev, as he had had great success already with
The Firebird and Petrushka (the latter to be played
next month by the BSO under Andris Nelsons). But this was such a
radical departure, in so many departments, that it literally shocked
his audiences, not least with its violent vision of the arrival of
spring, which he had based on an old Russian pagan ritual in which a
village of elders stood by as a young girl in fertility rites danced
herself to death. In its first half, after the famed entry of solo
bassoon (here beautifully delivered by Richard Svoboda) there was the
ritual of sacrifice, expressed primarily in dance and accompanying
music, with a heavy influence from folk songs borrowed from
traditional culture, really not a theft of the songs but more of a
transformation of the genre. With rhythms and accents intentionally
misplaced, shifting meters, and raw energy, it so upset some
first-time hearers that it caused an infamous riot. Some
short-sighted patrons at the time were repulsed by its seeming attack
on the traditions of the arts, but it would come to be seen as an
attempt to convey what art was capable of creating and how that may
be communicated. It's rightfully recognized today as a milestone in
the history of musical composition. Still, even today, it sounds as
though it were written tomorrow.
Dudamel displayed familiarity with both works and worked
his magic well (even with the parts of Stravinsky's work that long
ago found their way into Disney's movie Fantasia). The BSO was
equally at home with the program. Both pieces, especially the
Stravinsky, demand a leader who is vigorous, decisive and completely
in charge, and Dudamel fit the bill on all these prerequisites. The
BSO has performed these works under seventeen conductors in the past,
surely rarely so rapturously received. T. S. Elliott famously
referred to April as the cruelest month, and this was reflected in
both works, in particular in The Rite of Spring, definitely
not a piece for the faint of hearing.
This program will be repeated Tuesday April 9th though under Conductor Ken-David Masur, as Maestro Dudamel has had to withdraw due to an injury.
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