San Antonio Symphony
In Tchaikovsky Sixth, longing for life in presentiment of
death
May 9, 2011The most notorious “gotcha” in classical music comes at the end of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the “Pathetique.” The music comes to a rousing conclusion that tricks some listeners into thinking the piece is over. The unwary applaud vigorously, only to have their applause silenced by the somber beginning of the fourth movement, a meditation on approaching death.
It can be an awkward moment, but it became an Aha! moment in the San Antonio Symphony’s performance under music director Lang-Lessing on May 7, the finale of the orchestra’s four-concert survey of Tchaikovsky’s six numbered symphonies and two completed piano concerti.
In pre-concert remarks, Mr. Lang-Lessing noted that 19th century audiences were expected to applaud between the movements of symphonies and concerti; the silent treatment became the norm more recently. He also alerted newbies to the false finale of the Sixth Symphony. Although he did not explicitly solicit applause for that moment, in effect he granted permission for listeners to do without embarrassment what the music impelled them to do anyway. As a result, the penultimate movement got, not the customary smattering of applause, but a hearty ovation from throughout the nearly full Majestic Theater.
That was crucial to the success of the performance because, I would suggest, unrestrained applause at the end of the third movement is an essential musical component of this particular piece.
The first had begun in gloomy enervation upon which a furious tumult crashes without warning. The second, an off-kilter waltz distended to five beats, was the very picture of a life out of balance but making the best of it. In that context, the third movement seems like an evasion of the questions posed by the first two. It’s a quick march that grows increasingly giddy, triumphal and grandiose, and in this performance, for the first time, I was also struck by how banal it is. The grandeur is empty, the triumph illusory. The applause they automatically trigger underscores the allure of emptiness, the power of illusion.
The finale takes us back to reality and the things that matter. Others may differ, but I think the presentiment of death in the finale is not, for Tchaikovsky, an occasion for gloom but of reflection. There is wistfulness and sadness and longing. The strings begin with two weeping descending statements, but then immediately make a prayerful ascent, which sounded uncommonly radiant in this performance. The broader, serene melody that comes a little later is marked “con lenezza e devozione,” usually translated as “with gentleness and devotion,” and it, too, rises radiantly after an initial descent. The hushed ending, with the strings and bassoons dying away in their low register, is heavy with dissonant harmonies and gasping sforzandi, but this music strikes me not as despairing but as accepting.
Mr. Lang-Lessing and the orchestra, with strings augmented for the occasion, found much in this music that anticipated Mahler. Transparent balances, incisive rhythms, fully expressed dynamics and attention to Tchaikovsky’s many tempo shifts (too often glossed over) made the performance highly involving and, as it should be, disturbing.
The Second Piano Concerto, which opened the May 7 concert, is most distinctive for its middle movement, in which the soloist is joined by violin and cello soloists(concertmaster Ertan Torgul and principal cellist Kenneth Freudigman, both playing true to the Russian style and with sweeping lyricism). “Joined” is not quite the right word, as the violin and cello engage in an extended, deliberative dialog that the piano, mostly confined to a separate world, joins only belatedly and briefly. The piano part here is like the odd man out. The psychoanalytically inclined might conjecture that Tchaikovsky saw himself that way, in an age when homosexuality was so virulently condemned and misunderstood.
Mr. Kempf delivered the outer allegros with astonishing brilliance. As in his account of the Concerto No. 1 the previous weekend, his left hand produced explosions that might well have set off seismographs in Singapore.
The First (“Winter Daydreams”) and Fifth symphonies occupied the concert of May 6. Mr. Lang-Lessing and the orchestra admirably conveyed the color palette, pictorial quality and folk character of the First, though the frolicsome third movement might have been too tightly controlled. The Fifth was notable for a lovingly shaped Andante Cantabile, with beautiful solo work from principal horn Jeff Garza, principal clarinet Ilya Shterenberg and principal oboe Mark Ackerman; and a finale that surged with irresistible momentum.
During these concluding concerts of the symphony's Tchaikovsky marathon, the orchestral playing was a little less elegant and precise than it had been the opening weekend, but the lapses were slight.
Mike
Greenberg
