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St. Elizabeth's Church, Sidney
February 27, 2009
"Now for the first time I see what I lack; but I will study hard with Sechter so that I can make good the omission".
It was in the final year of his life, 1828, that Franz Schubert acquired scores of Handel's oratorios. That same year saw the composition of his final choral work, the Mass in E flat. The combination of these two events seems to have left Schubert convinced of the inadequacy of his own counterpoint (a view with which, all too easily, later generations have generally concurred - despite the clear counterexamples in, for example, the d minor String Quartet and the f minor Fantasy).
Simon Sechter was the leading expert of theory in Vienna - his most notable pupil would be Anton Bruckner - and Schubert attended his first lesson, along with fellow pupil Jozef Lanz, on November 4.
It was to be his only lesson; a week later Lanz arrived at Sechter's alone, telling his teacher that Schubert was very ill. Eight days later he was dead.
Schubert's Fugue in e minor for four hands, D.952 was, according to the New Grove, was completed on June 3, 1828, which puts it several months before his brief study with Sechter. Clearly counterpoint was occupying his mind in this last year.
Patrick Hauck and the Sidney Classical Orchestra opened Friday evening's concert with Hauck's own orchestration of the fugue, prefaced by the introduction from the Introduction and Variations on "Trockne Blumen", for flute and piano, D.802 of 1824.
This brief work showed both the orchestra and Hauck's orchestration to best effect. The playing was sombre, true, but beautifully balanced. The fugue itself, seeming a homage to Bach rather than Handel, was wonderful, with nicely contoured dynamics and that sense of inevitability which inhabits the best fugues.
The orchestration itself put me in mind somewhat of Hermann Scherchen's arrangement of The Art of Fugue - and I can think of no higher compliment.
There was a time - around a dozen years ago - when performances of Schubert's Symphony No.5 in Victoria popped up with a dreadful regularity - dreadful because several of those performances (no names, no pack drill) were very much "by the numbers".
But that was in the last century and it has been some time since I heard Schubert's Fifth in the flesh. I was very much ready to do so once more.
And this was definitely the performance for which I was ready. The fifteen strings (5-4-3-2-1) were perfectly balanced by the winds; the quicker music was brisk and airy, yet also lithe and muscular. And, most of all, the performers clearly had great affection for the music, which shone through.
Perhaps the highlight was the andante con moto, a beautifully-managed seamless outpouring of melody, replete with those extraordinary modulations into remote keys which signal that, whatever its influences, Schubert is the "onlie [possible] begetter" of this music. They epitomise, as Brian Newbould says, "the kind of heart-easing key-shift for which Schubert is famed."
This is not the only way to perform Schubert 5 (my favourite performance, a 1942 recording conducted by Oswald Kabasta, is very different: all Viennese gemutlichkeit) but it most certainly worked for me - and the rest of the audience.
Music's own version of the Pathetic Fallacy is the notion that music reflects the emotional circumstances of its composer. Even with such an admittedly autobiographical composer as Mahler, this is a scarcely tenable position: he composed his Sixth Symphony and the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) during the happiest, most successful stage of his entire career.
Similarly, Mozart's two great minor-key piano concertos were written during the heights of his worldly success; the Piano Concerto in c minor, K.491 was completed in March 1786 and premiered the following month, just weeks before the completion of The Marriage of Figaro. There is, to quote Olin Downes, "no simple, biographical explanation of these explosions."
Pianist Cary Chow joined Hauck and the orchestra for a marvellous performance of the c minor concerto. This was a true chamber performance: every strand of the musical fabric was audible. Tempos in the outer movements were weighty and fairly deliberate - clearly Hauck is no slave to "Historically Informed" dogma - while Chow's opening entry set a flowing tempo for the central Larghetto.
Although Chow has a massive technique - indeed, I have far more often hear him playing large-scale, Romantic works - there was never any question (as there has with other pianists I have heard) of his using said technique to batter the music into submission. From his first, thoughtful entry, Chow's pianism was fully at the service of the music, dominating the texture when appropriate, accompanying when that was required.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the work is its orchestration - it employs the largest orchestra Mozart used in a concerto - and, in particular the wonderful passages for wind-band.
The Sidney Classical Orchestra has a fine wind section and this concerto, particularly the second movement, allowed them full rein.
Altogether this was a wonderfully-proportioned performance; dramatic and tragic, to be sure, but never anachronistically so.
Of particular interest was Hauck's own cadenza for the first movement, receiving its premiere. Perhaps it was a little more harmonically adventurous than the surrounding music, although compared to Artur Schnabel's gloriously atonal cadenza it was a model of restraint, but it served its purpose and served it well.
This was a most rewarding and enjoyable evening. SCO Artistic Director Stephen Brown has chosen his Associate Conductor well.
It has been - unintentionally - several years since I last ventured to Sidney to hear this orchestra. It will not be years before I hear them again.
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