Philip Edward Fisher
February 24, 2018
You know the rap: Symphony orchestras need to make themselves more relevant to our time and our concerns. At this moment in history, when right-wing nationalist and anti-Enlightenment politics are gaining strength across both the United States and Europe, music should strike a blow for liberal, inclusionary, rational values.
And what does the San Antonio Symphony do? It plays Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 2. Brahms – a composer than whom none is deader, whiter, or maler. What could be less relevant to our circumstances?
In point of fact, nothing could be more relevant. American liberals, appalled by the rise of atavistic tribalism, can say with assurance: Brahms is one of us.
The Brahms Second was the capstone of the San Antonio Symphony’s concert Feb. 23 in the Tobin Center, with music director Sebastian Lang-Lessing conducting. The program opened with John Corigliano’s Promenade Overture, an engagingly comedic 1981 work. The centerpiece was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C, with the British pianist Philip Edward Fisher.
But back to Brahms. He was a German who took up residence in Vienna in the early 1860s and was based there until his death in 1897. We know from some of his letters and the contents of his library that he was a proponent of liberal democracy, which, in the 19th-century European context, meant a constitutional monarchy, an elected parliament and a rational, progressive and secular administrative state.
German liberalism in the 1860s was virtually synonymous with German nationalism, and Brahms was a nationalist to a degree – he favored German unification, and some of his music in the first half of his career celebrated the German Volk. But most of his friends were Jewish, although he himself was a faithful Lutheran, and he was a highly-educated intellectual and cosmopolitan who appreciated non-German cultures as well.
Brahms thus had no truck with the anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual and Christian chauvinist tendencies that came to dominate nationalist feeling (is this starting to sound familiar?) after the Panic of 1873, an economic crisis that ended a period of rapid industrial growth throughout Europe and the United States. The ensuing Long Depression had run only half its course by 1877, when Brahms composed his Symphony No. 2.
Brahms is usually labeled a musical conservative because he worked within some of the formal constraints of the earlier classical period and did not follow Wagner’s lead into harmonically and formally open-ended hyper-romanticism – and anti-Semitism.
But “conservative” isn’t quite the right term for Brahms’s music. He was most strongly influenced, after all, by Beethoven, the man who made transgressiveness a virtue in music. Beethoven’s genius was to think outside the box; Brahms’s genius was to make the box bigger. We find in Brahms as much expressive freedom as in Beethoven, even as much weirdness, and much that deserves to be called progressive. But Brahms developed a complex and stable musical architecture that allowed these progressive tendencies to be expressed constructively. The Second Symphony is a perfect analog of the liberal democratic order that was under threat at the time of its writing – and now.
The architecture of this mostly-sunny, open-hearted symphony was always at the forefront of this performance. Mr. Lang-Lessing’s interpretation was centrist, with no funny business and no bold new ideas. None were needed. The conductor’s attention to the long line, the seamless structural arc and the destination made their points. The orchestral sound was warm and burnished. The cellos did beautiful work in the songlike opening statement of the Adagio movement, and all the strings performed with admirable precision in the jolly presto section of the Allegretto.
Beethoven’s C-major piano concerto was his second in order of composition. The first version was completed in 1795, but Beethoven revised it extensively in 1798. He was still quite young, in his late 20s, and still under the influence of Mozart. Although Mr. Fisher got a big sound from the Steinway, he respected the Mozartian style – as did Mr. Lang-Lessing in the orchestral introduction. Sometimes the pianist pushed the tempo, with a slight loss of rhythmic acuity, but on the whole the performance was clear, direct and supple. He saved flamboyance for the first movement’s cadenza – the long one. I might have detected a hint of jazz feeling in the fast passagework of the finale, but that would be all to the good.
When the current season’s schedule was announced last spring, Mr. Fisher’s vehicle was to be John Corigliano’s Piano Concerto, which was commissioned by this orchestra and first performed 50 years ago. (Hilde Somer was the soloist, Victor Alessandro the conductor. The same forces recorded the piece for the Mercury label.)
It would have been nice the hear that concerto again, but Corigliano’s Promenade Overture was a perfectly agreeable way to celebrate his 80th birthday (granted, one week late). Composed in 1981 for the Boston Pops, the 8-minute piece is inspired by Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, but in reverse. At the beginning, the stage is empty. The percussion section enters and launches an elaborate tattoo, while offstage brass play a cartoonish fanfare. Then the other musicians enter section by section, starting with the piccolo (Julie Luker) playing an absurdly elaborate passage while strolling to her seat, and finishing with the tuba (Lee Hipp) depositing a frenzy of belches across the front of the stage. Much of the music is exuberant and satirical, but in the middle there’s a broad lyrical section that partakes of American pop and folk idioms. The performance was spirited and virtuosic all around.
Mike Greenberg
incident light
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Brahms, a voice for our time
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SA Symphony, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Philip Edward Fisher