Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Not that anyone would consider the opening work of the first concert dull. It was the Chicago premiere of John Adams’s orchestral work Century Rolls, and it proves if nothing else that Adams hasn’t lost his taste for surprises. Following the swerves and mutations of his style over the last couple of decades has been like following a soap opera: he’s gone from the most sternly austere of the minimalists to his current mode of garish postmodern extravagance, and with each new twist he’s set the entire classical community in an uproar. No other contemporary composer has quite the same knack for holding an audience: even his fiercest detractors (a group that includes most of my friends) still listen to him obsessively, if only to see what kind of travesty he’ll perpetrate next.
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The performance was pretty uneven, at least on opening night. The piece was written for pianist Emanuel Ax, who was the soloist; he was in fine form, but he’d clearly had time to master the intricacies of the score. The CSO wasn’t so lucky: it seemed underrehearsed, and some of the more complicated passages were distractingly ragged. Eschenbach saved the occasion by imposing a strong and lucid emotional curve on the score, one that firmed up the frayed ensembles and stressed the crescendos with surprising force. This is what he’s always been best at, and the result was triumphant. He gave the opening movement–which was more explicitly minimalist than Adams usually gets these days–an impressive sense of mounting drama; the swift and steady staccato pulsations grew ever more nerve-racking. The second movement, a slowly revolving cycle of subtle modulations, was as atmospheric as a lighthouse on a fogbound shore. And the fractured faux bebop of the finale was dazzlingly driven.
I will credit the piece with one more surprise: how well it worked as a lead-in for the major work on the program, Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony. I wouldn’t have figured that the relentlessly fashionable Adams had anything in common with a weird, inward loner like Bruckner, but the two proved to be very congenial company. Maybe it’s not so odd: after all, Bruckner’s style is a kind of protominimalism, built up out of slow, cyclical repetition of small motifs that neither develop nor evolve but inexorably grow more intense. The difference is in their sense of audience. Adams, despite his air of fierce experimentalism, is basically a showman: he has a keen ear for how much oddity the average listener can take. The more adventurous his pieces are, the shorter they are–Century Rolls lasts barely 20 minutes. But Bruckner goes on and on, piling up crescendo after titanic crescendo in a kind of timeless trance. The Sixth Symphony has a meager handful of thematic ideas compared to the exuberant profusion of Century Rolls, but it spins them out for more than an hour.
He couldn’t have picked a tougher challenge, as he surely knew. No one after Beethoven had as rich a palette as Brahms, who composed for orchestra the way Rembrandt painted–in thick, darkly glowing textures that seem like the essence of thought itself. His orchestral works are so deeply meditated, so overlaid with countless subtle shadings and afterthoughts, that they seem to have been formed more by geological processes than conscious craft. That’s not so different from some of Schoenberg’s own orchestral pieces, which tend toward the densely overgrown and clotted, so maybe it’s not strange that Schoenberg was able to contrive orchestrations that do–till the last movement anyway–sound a lot like Brahms.
The work has some merits. Harbison excels at composing for the voice, and some of his settings, particularly the prelude, are quite lovely. They have the same lucid blend of tradition and innovation that can be heard in his superb mini oratorio The Flight Into Egypt. I also like some of the purely orchestral interludes, which in their wayward inventiveness resemble his more graceful and fanciful works, including his Violin Concerto and his Concerto for Double Brass Choir and Orchestra. But the bulk of the piece is made up of highly abstract ensembles and solos that have been bleached of emotional content–they seem designed to offend as few people as possible while still holding on to some kind of artistic integrity, if only by way of chilly artifice. The libretto doesn’t help. It has a lot of the usual boilerplate about Jews and history–“We Jews remember; it is our job, our fate”–and a few glancing references to the intifada’s “eleven-year-old stone throwers whose hands we break.” The whole thing made a dismal contrast to the concert the week before: Bruckner conjures up vast impassioned epics for empires that don’t even exist, while for a real nation with a real history Harbison can concoct only this meaningless exercise in the blandly bold and the boldly bland.
