Tom McGee's Blog

Karen Pinoci con­ducts, and Christina Suh is the soprano soloist, in the pro­gram of Chabrier, Richard Strauss and Robert Schumann.

Per­son­ally, I’ve been want­ing to do this Schu­mann for years, but for some rea­son the orches­tras I’m in don’t attack his work with the excep­tion of the occa­sional con­certo, or maybe the Man­fred Over­ture. His rep as a bad orches­tra­tor is not entirely unde­served; there are a lot of overly thick tex­tures, too much tutti play­ing, which makes bal­ance and into­na­tion tough.

But despite all that, the piece is won­der­fully put together. It’s a five-movement trav­el­ogue of a trip up the Rhine (it’s nick­named the “Rhen­ish”), start­ing out with a swing­ing boat ride, a visit to a coun­try dance, and a remark­able trip through a gothic cathe­dral. Michael Steinberg’s notes for the San Fran­cisco Sym­phony explain:

“In Sep­tem­ber 1850, the Schu­manns made the thirty-mile trip to Cologne to wit­ness the instal­la­tion of Car­di­nal Arch­bishop von Geis­sel in the cathe­dral. Schu­mann was stunned by this, the largest Gothic build­ing in north­ern Europe, and he was excited by the splen­dor of the cer­e­mony. The fourth move­ment of the Rhen­ish Sym­phony is his musi­cal mon­u­ment to a build­ing that was almost as much a national totem as the river by which it stands. He reserves the sound of trom­bones for this tone pic­ture and (with effec­tive restraint) for the finale.”

Our con­duc­tor recently toured the build­ing her­self, and sup­plied a very detailed descrip­tion of how the fourth move­ment maps to a slow walk up the cen­ter aisle. Towards the end, you reach the transept, where brass chorales reflect the immense stained glass win­dows left and right. At the very end, the com­poser reaches the altar, makes the sign of the cross and kneels. This is more lit­eral than I like to get with an analy­sis, but it actu­ally works.

The Strauss is a dev­as­tat­ingly beau­ti­ful epi­logue to his long career. “Last Songs” means just that; he was old and frail, and in fact didn’t live long enough to see the pre­mier. Each of the songs addresses death on a metaphor­i­cal level. The titles them­selves, from the poems by Joseph Eichen­dorff and Her­man Hesse, con­vey mean­ing, “Spring” fol­lowed by “Sep­tem­ber,” “Going to Sleep,” and “Evening’s Glow.” They also mark the end of 19^th Cen­tury roman­ti­cism in music. Strauss, who began his career as the enfant ter­ri­ble of Ger­man music, iron­i­cally ended his career as a dinosaur, hope­lessly out of fash­ion with the cur­rent trends of exper­i­men­tal­ism and serialism.

But putting aside ques­tions of fash­ion­abil­ity (Bach was con­sid­ered old-fashioned as well), these are incred­i­bly sub­tle pieces of writ­ing, in which Strauss’ total mas­tery of com­plex har­mony and orches­tra­tion are appar­ent in every bar.

Not much to be said about Chabrier’s España, just a nice light opener. Have fun.

Cost?

The con­cert is free. Come on down, and bring your friends.