Chicago Symphony Orchestra
I was never much of a fan of modernism and certainly not of its ideology. But after hearing a lot of the new stuff I have to say I miss the old doctrinaire passion. The new works–such as John Adams’s recent large-scale atonal pieces Harmonielehre and the Chamber Symphony–sound like they were written mostly for laughs, as a kind of retro-kitsch nostalgia; they make modernism out to be the classical equivalent of Lava lamps or platform shoes. Only a few contemporary composers are investigating the modernist legacy with any seriousness–seeing if any of its harshest effects can be made to work with an audience, trying to discover whether any of its ferociously cerebral styles can be assimilated into some ongoing tradition.
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The star of the first concert was Stravinsky. He’s become something of a model among new composers for his idiosyncratic response to the chaos of modern music. (The modernists used to despise him for his lack of ideological purity.) Over the course of his long career he ransacked just about every conceivable modern style to create works that ranged from the austere neo-Baroque of The Rake’s Progress to the full-tilt atonal estrangement of Requiem Canticles–and yet they all came out sounding just like Stravinsky. Knussen is a passionate and exhaustively knowledgeable fan of this work–he’s recorded two whole CDs of Stravinsky’s most esoteric style hopping: the neo-Romantic phase (The Fairy’s Kiss) and the late experiments with serialism (The Flood). For the CSO he picked out one standard work, The Firebird Suite, and two pieces so obscure the CSO had never played them before: the Canon on a Russian Popular Tune and The Faun and the Shepherdess.
Still, you could tell why Knussen likes the piece so much. It’s one of Stravinsky’s earliest works, but it shows in embryo his gift for assimilating other people’s styles without being victimized by them. He composed it when he was still a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and wholly under the spell of the Russian Romantics, and yet it’s still got that familiar Stravinskyan freshness and clarity, that flair for the dramatic gesture, that brilliant surface and freedom from sentimentality that would later flower into masterworks like The Rite of Spring and the Symphony of Psalms. What it doesn’t have is a lot of inherent worth. At the end I was still unpersuaded that I’d heard anything more than an apprentice piece by somebody who would later become a great composer, and it made me think that Knussen’s hero worship was compromising his taste.
Painful as this was, Knussen made up for it with his two works: extended excerpts from the children’s operas he wrote in collaboration with Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are and The Way to Castle Yonder. These were original, beautiful, and fascinating. They also managed to make almost everything that had been flying around randomly in these concerts come together: Knussen’s love of fantasy, his wayward taste, his openness to all sorts of strange influences, from the avant-garde to Disney, and most of all his fascination with the dramatic surfaces of modernist sound.
