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University Centre Auditorium
October 28, 2011
In December 1972, Lucy van Pelt paid a call on Schroeder, in order to wish him a Happy Beethoven's Birthday, adding "aren't you going to give me a kiss?"
When Schroeder demurs ("Good grief, no!"), she suggests "Beethoven would have wanted you to." In response to Schroeder's dignified "I doubt that very much", she fires her big guns: "Well, I'll bet BRAHMS would have wanted you to."
Despite her tender years, Lucy had grasped the essence of Brahms, the man and his music: emotion, passion even. (She was arguably right about Beethoven, too - don't worry we'll get to him in good time.)
It is somewhat unfortunate, therefore, that Ajtony Csaba conducting the latest incarnation of the University of Victoria Orchestra, should have chosen an approach which, with its hyper-detailed, almost pointillist view of the music, robbed Brahms's Fourth Symphony of any recognisable emotional content.
From an opening which was just that little bit too slow, so that the inner parts (second violins and violas) did not flow sufficiently, to a final coda which seemed to lack in finality, the performance was marked by inexplicable shifts in tempo and the emphasis on small details - it was an analytical approach, but akin to analysing the architecture of St. Paul's Cathedral with a microscope.
Not that there weren't details to enjoy in the playing: the deep, weighty pizzicatos in the first movement; the horns (if a little too forceful) and winds in the second; the brio of the scherzo, with a marvellously subtle triangle.
Overall, though, I can only repeat the query I made in my notebook during the finale, marked allegro energico e passionato, for heaven's sake: where's the passion?
Iannis Xenakis's Metastasis was the final work in his Anastenaria triptych, completed in late 1954. One of its more notable features is extended glissandi, which were graphically conceived based on ruled parabolas. (Xenakis would apply this technique architecturally in the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World Fair, while he was working with Le Corbusier.)
First performed at Donaueschingen in 1955, Metastasis, which outraged a number of serial composers present, is the work which brought Xenakis to international attention.
Friday's performance must have been of the chamber version, for the work is scored for sixty-one performers, each with their own part, whereas I counted only forty-three (or was it forty-four?) players on the stage of the Farquhar Auditorium.
Ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this short (it lasts around eight minutes) work was the most cohesive performance of the evening. The massed unison string tone and the prominent glissandi were particularly impressive.
Pace Schroeder, there is good evidence to suggest that Beethoven was in favour of kissing pretty girls.
Moreover, despite his clearly fearsome intellectual powers (Jascha Horenstein once remarked that, for Schoenberg and his pupils, no music which did not derive directly from Beethoven's Op.131 was even worth mentioning), to deny that Beethoven also had an emotional side would be futile.
Friday's concert opened with the overture Leonore, No.3 - Beethoven's final attempt to craft an overture from the music of his only opera (in its original version called Leonore, not Fidelio) before composing the brief, thematically unrelated overture the revised opera bears today.
At first I was prepared to be impressed: the portentous opening, was slow but controlled, although ensemble was a little loose on occasion. The bass line - unusually, the basses were to the left of the stage, the violins, authentically, placed to either side - was particular solid.
As the music gathered speed - but not, it transpired, momentum - enlivened with an ebullient flute solo, there was a lot of inner detail on display which is usually buried in the overall texture.
But once again, that focus on the fine detail detracted from the overall architecture of the music; this time it was anatomical in nature, like watching a dissection. Indeed, I have never, to my knowledge, heard a performance with so many different tempos.
The decision to have the beginning of the coda - a mad race by the first and second violins - played by the front desks only was by common consent, a wise one: Beethoven almost invites poor ensemble, yet on this occasion all was crisply together.
I could not help but feel, though, that music about Love, Politics and Freedom should have been imbued with a shred or two of emotion.
The orchestra is largely new and has a significantly smaller body of strings than in recent years. Nonetheless, there was some fine playing from all sections, even if by the end of the Brahms, they were beginning to sound a little tired. But I wouldn't want to make too much of this.
Gustav Mahler famously observed that there is more to music than merely the notes. Friday's concert was a triumphant demonstration, by counterexample, of the truth of his remark.
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