The MO is playing one of my favorite pieces this week. Really, Manny? Yes, really. To top it off, were playing it with one of our former music directors Edo deWaart. I learned An Alpine Symphony with maestro deWaart back in the 1980s. It is the last of Strauss mammoth tone poems for large orchestra, as he focused on vocal music, concerti, operas for much of the time after that. What is unique about this particular tone poem is that there isnt a story, per se. There is a premise; up and down a mountain in one day. For whatever he may have said about there not being a story for his other tone poems like Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegl, Also Sprach Zarathustra, it is my opinion that he was just being coy as composers will often be about what they write. Strauss, by this time, has become a composer who is truly expert at setting a scene in which you can believe. You truly come away with the sense that, yes, this is what dawn sounds like and this is what a storm sounds like. He takes what Beethoven set about to do in the Pastoral Symphony and submits it to the instruments Beethoven never had such as tenor tuba, a heckelphone (which has a disturbingly similar appearance to a golf club) and wind and thunder machines. He stretches the limits of what brass instruments were supposed to be able to do, as Mahler did in his 8th symphony a few years earlier. To be sure, he does name the sections of this symphony but he finally does leave you to conjure a story of your own making as you begin your ascent at first light, arrive at a meadow with cows and the bells about their necks, pass by a waterfall, cut away brambles and thorns (while you wonder whether youre lost!), feel the frosty chill of a glacier, and finally arrive at the summit. In essence, you are the story. He gives way to feeding you a plot and allows you to fill in the blanks. It serves to make the music extremely personal. This is what is so compelling about this particular 50 minutes of music. You are the owner for that length of time. It is a tremendous gift from Strauss to you. One of my favorite moments is one of the creepiest in all of written music. As you are at the summit you are asked to have a vision as one might when influenced by high altitudes. In that moment of solitude an oboe peeps repeatedly in the midst of the stillness. That peeping could be anything from a distance bird to a modern-day heart monitor reflecting an eerie calm before the greatest storm scene this musician has ever experienced. He does manage to bring us back to a lower point of terra firma before the piece is done and you, the listener will be exhausted... if you allow your imagination to do what it does best. Finally, the thought occurs to you that as this piece ends with the calming nocturnal peace that begins it Strauss, for all of his larger-than-life sounds he creates in his tone poems, ends this one as he does almost every one of his tone poems: quietly. Thats right. The only popular Strauss tone poems that end with a bang are Till Eulenspiegls Merry Pranks and his Sinfonia Domestica The majority end in a delicate piano. So, more than the music itself, the silence after the orchestra ends is part of the music and Strauss understood that. Its why some of the greatest things he wrote were the quieter moments. I hope to see you Friday and Saturday night at Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis for a tremendous reunion of conductor and orchestra. Bring your hiking boots and prepare yourself for an ascent into the reaches of your imagination.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 16:55:45 +0000
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