San Antonio Symphony, Robert McDuffie
In new violin concerto, Philip Glass nods to the
baroque, and contradicts it
April 2, 2011The recently hatched Violin Concerto No. 2, by Philip Glass was the centerpiece of a San Antonio Symphony concert, April 1, devoted to baroque music and its progeny.
Jean-Marie Zeitouni, recently named music director of the Columbus Symphony, returned for his third guest-conducting appearance with the San Antonio band. The violin soloist was Robert McDuffie, for whom Mr. Glass composed his concerto.
The new work is subtitled “The American Four Seasons” and is ostensibly modeled on Vivaldi. There has always been a partial resemblance between the Italian baroque style, with its great reliance on repeating patterns, and Mr. Glass’s own, so the connection isn’t much of a stretch, at least superficially. But Mr. Glass lives in a very different historical period, and in a very different culture, than Vivaldi’s.
As Paul Henry Lang indicated in his essential "Music in Western Civilization," baroque music, art and architecture expressed in their flamboyant excess the ain’t-we-grand triumphalism of an ascendant Western Europe. That attitude pervaded the three authentically baroque works on this program -- G.F. Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, a suite from Jean-Phillipe Rameau’s opera-ballet “Nais,” and Zeitouni’s arrangement of a Giovanni Gabrieli Canzon for antiphonal brass. (In remarks to the audience, Zeitouni followed common practice in identifying Gabrieli, who died in 1612, as a Renaissance composer, but Lang made a strong case for placing him in the early baroque.)
Mr. Glass’s music, even in this concerto, is almost the antithesis of the baroque in spirit. Mr. Glass’s ways of dealing with harmony and time suggest a sense of a world always in flux, and there is nothing in his music to congratulate the established order. Although the concerto's solo part demands virtuosity, and Mr. McDuffie complied, the virtuosic elements are more structural than decorative.
Mr. Glass’s concerto adds a keyboard synthesizer (played nicely by Vivienne Spy) to Vivaldi’s contingent of solo violin and strings, and each of the four movements is preceded by a sort of solo meditation. (The first of these is called a Prologue, the other three are designated as Songs.) These unaccompanied pieces sounded more akin to J.S. Bach’s solo cello suites or keyboard preludes than to the style of Vivaldi.
The slow second movement ventures farthest in refining the style that Mr. Glass established as his own in the 1970 and ‘80s. The orchestra, often playing at a diaphanous whisper, is given marvelously subtle shifts in harmony. The movement has the character of a leave-taking -- mournful at first, and then, after an animated trio, achingly poignant. It’s among the finest and most beautiful music Mr. Glass has ever given us.
Not least of the concerto’s virtues is that it gives Mr. McDuffie ample opportunities to find and express nuances of shape, dynamics, timing and tone. This was a supremely intelligent and deep performance. One had the feeling that Mr. McDuffie discovers some new level of meaning in the music every time he plays it.
The performance owed much of its effectiveness to Mr. McDuffie’s physicality. Rocking back and forth or swaying side to side on feet planted far apart, he threw himself bodily into the music, and carried his listeners with him.
Mr. Zeitouni was most in his element in Handel and Rameau, giving both works fleet, zesty, high-stepping accounts. The conductor fully captured the grandeur of the French-baroque approach to rhythm (and the shameless, delicious theatricality of Rameau), but he also made the music sing.
Gabrieli’s “Canzon in Echo, Duodecimi Toni, a 10” found the symphony’s brass in somewhat less agile and reliable form than usual. Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassical “Dumbarton Oaks,” a chamber-orchestra work patterned on the baroque concerto grosso, wanted energy and crispness, but there were many excellent individual performances, especially among the woodwinds.
By the way, the neoclassical style (developed by Stravinsky and others in the early 20th century) is called neoclassical rather than neobaroque because the term baroque was not widely applied to music until "Music in Western Civilization" was published in 1941. Before that, the music we now call baroque was usually called early classical.
Mike
Greenberg
