MTT, Yea, You Know Me
I recently experienced.
The first performance of the season I witnessed was Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the San Francisco Symphony playing Copland’s Our Town, Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, and Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C minor. The pastoral landscape that Copland set as the background to our evening was like smelling artifical grass in a fragrance laboratory-it was soft, sweet, and tender; it took us, rolled us over, and softly rubbed our backs; but we knew its authenticity had waned. I’ve been reading extensively the fascinating and quite illuminating correspondance between Berg and Schoenberg around the time Berg completed and dedicated the Three Pieces to his tortuous master and cunning slave for his birthday. It was a dialectic and strangely Freudian relationship that softly faded into father-like idolatry. With the Three Pieces, we hear the initial embrace of what Adorno calls Berg’s ultimate “discoveries” in compositional technique. Schoenberg knew his young fin-de-siecle, Strindberg-loving, Altenberg-admiring pupil needed to breath fully the air of the last 50 years to exhale his own genius and get over the temporal trendiness of the young avants. I agree with Adorno. Whereas Webern contains everything from the atom to the dying stars in a mere 40 second phrase of jumps, jigs, and jets, Berg masterly and controllably forces his expression through a more revealed, or sublimated, form. Adorno: “In Berg elaboration of detail means something akin to the Hegelian Aufhebung, that is to say, their abolition and subsequent preservation on a higher plane.” If you begin the Götterdämmerung and complete Adams’ Harmonielehre, you experience a macroscopic pursuit of the astute and historical locus of Berg’s ambition. Tilson Thomas agrees so much he decided to give a mini lecture on it before the piece began. He gave suggestive explanatory statements describing the development of motifs and contextualizations, quoting the work by simply waving the musicians into illustrative demonstrations. What power? What connection with such a medium, to be able to control such high caliber talent, to walk a hall of white, elderly, and tonally-enveloped ears through an otherwise “disturbing” and “difficult” cacophony before facing the maelstrom. But Brahms survived them all and demonstrated the epitomy of scale that defined and subsequently regimented the latter half of the 19th century in Wien that came to shape Berg, in turn.
A disturbing occurence is a classification I would use to describe a hall of concert-goers at Disney Hall being asked politely by one of the world’s leading and legendary conducters to respect the purity of silence between the movements of Brahms’ music and hearing thunderous clapping instead.
