Chicago Symphony Orchestraat Orchestra Hall, November 27, December 3, and December 10
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But I’ll be fair. Orbital Beacons isn’t worthless. It does have an interesting gimmick: a reshuffling of the musicians onstage into smaller groups that function something like competing chamber orchestras. (If I understand the schematic correctly, there are seven groups, plus a squad of percussionists.) This may not sound like a big deal, but the sonic texture of a symphony orchestra is so complicated that even the smallest repositioning of the musicians can cause curious acoustic effects. Thomas’s arrangement gave an unusual glassiness and sharpness to the individual groups that was pretty intriguing. (It also showed off to good advantage the Orchestra Hall rehab, because this is exactly the sort of trickery the hall’s old acoustics would have smothered.) She isn’t the first composer to play around with this idea–a lot of Elliott Carter’s pieces require scrambled seating plans–but her version is distinctive, and I hope she goes on exploring it.
As for the composition itself–well, at least Boulez liked it. It’s supposed to evoke the night sky: the six brief movements are each named after constellations, and the title has a sort of Star Trek technobabble sound–imposing but meaningless. But the music struck me as generic and not evocative of much of anything. The movements alternate between sinuous legato lines for woodwinds and strings and loud staccato passages heavy on the horns, with some peculiar bits of percussion thrown in for seasoning. This description would fit just about every piece of music commissioned by American symphony orchestras in the last 20 years, and it indicates that academic modernism still has a death grip on a whole generation of composers. Thomas may have more talent than many of them–I did like a couple of her percussive passages, which suggest she has a wild streak that might someday erupt into something interesting–but the overall effect was timid and orthodox.
Boulez was just as good with the Berg–better because it isn’t as accomplished a piece. Berg originally wrote it as a six-movement chamber work and then shortly afterward rescored the inner three movements for a string orchestra. Most critics have regarded the rescoring as a failure, a layer of skewed indirection added to a work that was none too direct to begin with. But this kind of challenge is right up Boulez’s alley. He was especially impressive with the weird allegro misterioso movement, where the strings swarm in furious gnatlike clusters, but even with the less focused andante and allegro furioso, the wandering melodic substance and vague harmonies seemed to hang together in an eccentric but genuine balance.
What was most startling was that all this lavish loveliness was by Bartok. He’s not a name that comes to mind when you think of having a good time at the concert hall. His music ordinarily makes the hardiest modernist blanch: his hyperabstract approach to composition, his bizarre taste for backcountry Hungarian folk music, and the off-the-scale spookiness of his sensibility make him a byword for everything that’s most unnerving about modern music. It’s true that the two pieces Boulez picked for this concert are usually counted as examples of the “nice” and “accessible” Bartok, but those are relative terms. If any other composer had written a violin concerto as hysterically rhapsodic as this one or a ballet score with as strong an undertow of sinister mystery, you’d worry about the guy’s sanity. But we’re talking about Bartok. His Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta is so menacing that Stanley Kubrick used it on the sound track of The Shining, and his other big ballet score, The Miraculous Mandarin, creates such a weird and oppressive sonic environment that one critic has suggested putting it on the stereo whenever you need to clear your house of unwanted guests.
