Pairing Shostakovich’s terse First Cello Concerto with Strauss’ expansive Alpine Symphony sounds a bit like the musical equivalent of brushing your teeth and then drinking orange juice. The concerto is nearly deconstructed in nature, defying conventions of form. Strauss’ final tonal poem, on the other hand, pushes late romanticism to its absolute limits. Decadent lines stretch into dissonance and deftly resolve into Heimatsfilm-style kitsch in the blink of an eye; a tonal sleight of hand that is quintessentially Strauss. This weekend, the Vienna Philharmonic under Semyon Bychkov brought these two disparate works together, and while not perhaps the most intuitive programming, it felt strangely comfortable.
Then again, Bychkov’s conducting always feels like coming home to me; the calm solidity of his movements, his grounded gesture and unhurried demeanour seem comfortable and familiar. Though this may in part be linked to our overlapping biographies, it is certainly also indicative of the trust he now seems effortlessly granted by musicians the world over. Bychkov emigrated from Russia to the USA after a brief Vienna stopover in his early twenties. He made a name for himself – after completing his studies at the Mannes School of Music – as conductor in residence in my home town, Grand Rapids Michigan, and then in Buffalo, New York, by American standards just down the road from my Alma Mater, the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. The Bychkov era in both places is still a much-discussed and well-remembered; a formative period in the classical music scenes of two mid-sized, Midwestern cities. That a Russian-born refugee would come to be so key to the musical life half a world away speaks to that fact that music connects, transcending questions of heritage, belief, or language.
All this is a metaphor for the musical arch of this program. For all their inherent differences, both Shostakovich and Strauss were both actively defining and responding to their unique social and musical surroundings in these compositions. The Alpine Symphony revels in the decadence of late-romanticism to the point of straining the bounds of traditional tonality, while Shostakovich actively rejects formal norms, literally carving his own initials into his musical landscape. Both compositions, in addition, feature moments of exquisite melancholy and folk elements like Shostakovich’s Yiddish melodies in the second movement of the Concerto or Strauss’ raucous hunting horns in “Der Anstieg”.