Christian Tetzlaff (alexandra-vosding.de)

The piece from last night’s concert that motivated my purchase was Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, performed by Christian Tetzlaff—a violinist of modest stature with a powerful sound.  The performance generally matched my expectations of the piece, though Tetzlaff took the first movement cadenza and a few other passages at a much faster pace than most of the recordings I have heard.  It didn’t, however, sound like a reading by Heifetz, who is praised (and occasionally criticized) in many an Amazon product review for his breakneck performance of this piece with Fritz Reiner conducting.  To me, Heifetz was more scrupulous and calculated, if you will, about his articulations.  Tetzlaff hammered through with unbridled verve.

Despite the concerto being my initial reason for attending the concert, my experience was really sculpted by the other parts of the program, including a new work called Post-Scriptum by Victor Kissine, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, and Liszt’s tone poem Tasso: Lamento e trionfo.

The new work by Kissine saw its world premiere last night.  The piece was somewhat tonal, but dissonant throughout, with every emerging trace of melodic clarity stamped out by percussive inquietude.  There were more delicate moments too that brought forth the spirit of a horror movie, and in fact, there was at least one place in the piece where the bow of a contrabass was drawn vertically across the outer edge of a suspended cymbal to produce the same eerie squeal that you might hear in The Ring or F.E.A.R (yes, the video game).

Inside Davies Symphony Hall (_e.t@Flickr)

Apart from the time I played the Ma mère l’oye orchestral suite with PYMO, this was the first time I had heard an orchestral work by Ravel performed live. Not that I ever doubted it, but I now believe fully in the composer’s genius in orchestration, which is manifest only partially in even the best recordings. And recordings just don’t do justice to the truly jubilant (and utterly loud) moments in the Valses. As far as conductors go, MTT maintains a pretty conservative presence at the podium, but he still manages to generate a huge sound from his musicians.

The tone poem by Liszt that closed the program reminded me of something I once read, regarding a tone poem by Tchaikovsky.  At the time of this writing, the Wikipedia article on Tchaikovsky’s program work after Francesca Da Rimini mentions that its “swirling chromaticism” may suggest the influence of Liszt.  Wherever this claim originated, it is likely that the author had Tasso: Lamento e trionfo in mind.  Descending, chromatic motifs from this piece, as well as an overall, aggravated tone, are echoed frequently in Tchaikovsky’s piece.  My predilection for the Russian composer’s style must have preempted my ability to digest Tasso though, as its capricious emotional landscape literally left me a little confused.

Celibidache conducts Tchaikovsky's 4th

However, while there are countless recordings of these symphonies on the market, I think we’ve all grown accustomed to hearing a certain kind of Tchaikovsky.  That is, few times have my ears ever been challenged by a noticeably divergent interpretation of these pieces.  A fifteen minute first movement of the fifth symphony, for example, is standard fare.

Or at least this was the case it seemed until I discovered the recordings of these symphonies performed by Romanian conductor Sergui Celibidache with the Munich Philharmonic.  There are certainly a few things that make these recordings special, but the first thing I’ll mention is the most obvious: the track lengths listed on the back of each album case immediately indicate just how slow he takes these pieces.  His recorded performance of the fourth symphony, for example, lasts a staggering 56′25″.  The only other recording (that I know of) that even comes remotely close to this is Leonard Bernstein’s recording with the New York Philharmonic, clocking in at roughly 48 minutes.

But of course, raw length doesn’t say much about any performance beyond vaguely describing the tempo.  In fact, while it may be common to apply a deliberate slowness to Tchaikovsky’s music for gross emotional flavoring, this probably wasn’t Celibidache’s intent.  The late conductor’s son explains his father’s philosophy:

According to my father, the tempo of a specific piece is not given by a metronome number but depends much rather on other criteria in the score and on the acoustic of a hall.  This tempo fluctuates according to the complexity of the notes and their epiphenomena.  In short, more notes need more time to develop and return (to the ear).  The richer the music, the slower the tempo.

Tchaikovsky

This is a decidedly intellectual approach to performing music, but a fitting one for a conductor who committed to creating unique, enriching experiences for himself, the musicians, and the audience.  Unfortunately, the intricacies are mostly lost in the translation of real sound to electrical signals for those of us forced to relive the event through iTunes.  Celibidache likewise frowned sternly upon recorded music, believing it to be an encumbrance to one’s spontaneity and in general a watered-down, unflattering rendering of the total experience.  These recordings were thus produced and released posthumously by his son.

What we hear in these recordings is extremely passionate music, but I’m almost ashamed to say it given that this is simply the nature of Tchaikovsky’s music.  Merely relaxing the tempo could not alone explain the effectiveness of Celibidache’s conducting, but I will say that the dauntingly lachrymose finale of the sixth symphony is especially effective at this pace.

I’ll dispense with any attempt to qualitatively describe Celibidache’s performances in words; frankly, I’ve never been satisfied with any kind of language that attempts to communicate musical feeling (the kind you find in concert program notes, for example).  It just sounds silly and overworked to me.  I’ll simply recommend that you give at least one of these recordings a dedicated listen, uninterrupted, from beginning to end, and hopefully on a device with respectable audio capabilities (i.e. your laptop speakers won’t do).  A conductor who didn’t believe in recorded music deserves at least that much.

Ms. Wang (Felix Broede)

Not that she probably hasn’t already considered it.

A fine example of Horner's work

Down Arpeggiated Chord

At first I though this element was synthesized, but after fooling around at the 88 for a bit, I realized that it’s most likely the figure below.

D-major arpeggiated chord

Horner typically inserts this piano arpeggio in places where the upper strings are the only other active orchestral voices.  Usually, juxtaposing a higher-register section of the orchestra with a low one (with nothing in between) effects a distant, expansive quality.  Examples from his scores can be found in Deep Impact, The Perfect Storm, and Apollo 13.

Chimes

There’s something about bells that evokes a sense of grand antiquity—a quality most likely born out of our familiarity with their pre-modern functions.  Horner uses tubular bells (or chimes) in a number of different musical settings (from the charging of Fort Wagner in Glory to the to the tidal force of the sea in The Perfect Storm), but they achieve the same effect in each situation.  Opinions will vary by the listener, but to me, the use of chimes lifts his music into a vast, limitless space where the sound floats freely, without bounds.  This is appropriate given the types of films he has scored.

The Lydian Mode

I haven’t exactly made a list of the places where I’ve heard Horner write with Lydian modality, but I think I’d be able to point it out in most of his major projects.  If you haven’t heard the term before, you’ve at least heard the theme to The Simpsons, which hits some of the key pitches of a modern Lydian scale.  In Apollo 13, Horner uses climbing Lydian scales in the violin section during the mission launch sequence, and the horn call that opens his score for the film Deep Impact, shown below, adheres to the Lydian mode on D (basically D major with the fourth scale degree raised a semitone).

Opening horn call from Deep Impact

The intervals that constitute a Lydian scale are close enough to those of an Ionian scale (the common major scale that your Western-classical-music-attuned ear loves to hear) that it isn’t as unsettling as some of the other modes.  In fact, if you listen to this horn call, you’d probably find it very sonorous and calming.

That’s also partly because the French horn is awesome.

Anyway, these are the three major elements that make James Horner’s music most recognizable to me, but I’d be remiss to leave it at that.  While they are among the most easily discernible features of his compositional style, they aren’t the whole of it.  An artist is many things, and the palpable elements are merely a vague manifestation of what’s really in the heart and soul.

Oh, and obviously, he isn’t the only composer using chimes, the Lydian mode, and piano thingamabobbers.

A stamp honoring Shostakovich

I sympathize with men like Prokofiev and Shostakovich—artists whose musical output was, at least for some portion of their careers, dictated by the aesthetic counsel of the Soviet Union.  And I am therefore grateful that Rachmaninoff managed to live a life more or less free of political directives interfering with his creativity.  Already, the man suffered from lifelong insecurity regarding the value of his own work; I can’t imagine how the hammer and sickle might have molded his music into something else.

A Young Rachmaninoff (senar.ru)

The opinion inherent in their seeming inseparability is that their works demonstrate an uncanny gift for melody and emotional expression.  On separate occasions in fact, I’ve heard their symphonies described as “dark and brooding”.   This point of view by itself makes complete sense, and I would be the last to refute it, but it also suggests an idiomatic similarity between the two that obscures their basic differences.  Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff were very much not the same composer at all.    Admittedly, Tchaikovsky can be held partially responsible for the later composer’s general attitude towards composition, but stylistically, Rachmaninoff as a composer borrows from elsewhere (notably, The Five) and innovates plenty in his own right.

I’m not really familiar with the full range of Rachmaninoff’s true compositional influences (as there is, I think, a pianistic element in Liszt and Chopin that I know little about), but I’ve been starting to see some traces of the middle-Romantic, Russian school in his pieces. There is, for example, a foreshadowing of his idiom in Borodin’s tone poem In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880).  In particular, two musical devices that feature prominently in Rachmaninoff’s output make an almost overstated appearance in this piece: step-wise motion and counterpoint.  (I admit, the former is less a device than it is just a fashion in which to craft harmony.)

Theme from Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia

The theme from Steppes above curiously derives its effectiveness from its excessive restatement of the same few pitches, over and over again.  It wanders little more than a third from where it begins on the third scale degree, and yet by gradually teeter-tottering its way to the tonic, it manages to fill the expanse of some ten measures before finally coming to rest.  Some thirty years later, the themes and opening clarinet solo of the adagio movement from Rachmaninoff’s 2nd symphony echo this pattern.

Both works also make heavy use of counterpoint, though most likely for different reasons.  Borodin wrote this tone poem to depict an encounter between travelers on the Caucasus of eastern Europe, and arranging several melodies in counterpoint is how he simply makes musical sense of this scene and the commotion of the caravans. As for Rachmaninoff’s symphony, one can never be really sure of why a composer uses a particular device if no clear program is known, other than because he likes the way it sounds or because it is simply in his style.  In this case, we know that Rachmaninoff was a gifted artist in contrapuntal writing and that it interested him enough to employ it widely.  After all, he did have, if only briefly, the illustrious Taneyev as a pedagogue in said discipline.

Western Caucasus, Russia

Of course, anytime we perceive the influence of one artist on another, we can’t be certain that the inspiration was conscious.  In fact, it’s usually not.  I think there’s more evidence to suggest that the traces of Russian Romanticism that made it into Rachmaninoff’s music resulted implicitly from the nuances of his education at the conservatory in Moscow and his exposure to the great Russian masters while they were still alive during his youth.

Because of this influence, I sometimes think of Rachmaninoff as the culmination of all the Russian tradition that came before him, but his melodies don’t carry as much of the eastern—or sometimes deemed “oriental”—tinge of, say, Borodin’s large-scale orchestral works or Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.  Whatever the case, we know from his memoirs of the great respect he held for his predecessors and of the pain he suffered as an exile from his home country.  These sentiments, together with his staunch devotion to capturing beauty through emotion in music, confirm his standing as a truly Russian composer.

I’ve developed a fondness for most anything resembling a descant now because of the way they transform the roles of the other voices in a piece.  They are ornamental, but you can also fixate on them, since they are, by definition, counter-melodies. Traditionally, I think the term has ecclesiastic roots in hymnal music, but it has come into use to generally denote a counter-melody above and removed from the other voices.

In a choral setting, a few sopranos seem to be the natural choice for a descant part.  In the symphony orchestra though, the choice depends on what makes sense from the standpoint of orchestral color and texture.  In a passage dominated by woodwinds for example, I think the clarinet makes a terrific descant instrument, for reasons that are more or less subjective.

In a tutti section, the descant role is more demanding.  A woodwind instrument will not carry enough sound.  Twenty violins can produce the sound, but in Western classical, Romantic music, chances are the composer has charged the upper strings with the melody.  I also feel that we have been conditioned to hear violins en masse as heralds of melody, so to avoid confusion, we best not afford them the part.

Enter the horn.

The idea of the horn behaving as a descant instrument occurred to me recently as I was listening to Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 (though the very existence of descant horns may also have had something to do with it).  The opening movement, an expanded sonata form movement, is an exercise in counterpoint and a testament to the composer’s expertise thereof.  In the second group of the exposition, the first and second violins carry the melody in octaves, but they are accompanied by one of my favorite instances of non-soloistic horn writing.  I’ll let the parts speak for themselves:

Horn and strings in Rachmaninoff's 2nd symphony (horns in E)

There’s something about the horn in its upper range that gives it a distant and suspended quality that is free of the edginess with which brass sometimes are (unjustly) associated.  Actually, this is the reason why the solitary horn call is in general so haunting and such an effective orchestral element.  Though Rachmaninoff voices this particular passage for the whole horn section, it is dominated by the counter-melody in the first and third horns, which moves decidedly when the melody does not.  Parts of it have an unambiguous arch to them, and the overall shape of the line is defined by gradual, step-wise motion.

The emotionality inherent in this passage is really beyond my words. Give it a listen if you have the chance.

There are a few other examples from Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre that I’ve been entertaining in the back of my mind.  The most obvious to me is a conspicuously optimistic interlude early on in the third movement of his fourth concerto, where the first horn ascends and gradually descends a D major pentatonic scale.  There are also fleeting moments in his choral symphony The Bells and in his baritone cantata Spring where the horn assumes a descant-like role, albeit with less interesting parts (in some cases, just a well placed, sustained pitch).

This is what imbues Rachmaninoff’s music with an aesthetic that I’m at a loss to describe as anything but heavenly.  Composers of the Romantic period all wrote soulful tunes and melodies for the classical radio, but few captured an emotional palette as complex as Rachmaninoff’s orchestral coloring.  A unifying characteristic of these descant-like moments is that many of them signify release or resolution after a swell of harmonic ambiguity or even cacophony — a musical eye-of-the-storm in some contexts or, in others, just a momentary repose.

To me, these are moments that communicate a sense of serenity and clarity, which, given the modern, post-Romantic, serialist landscape in which they were conceived, is refreshing.