For this, the second concert in a three-day stopover at Carnegie Hall, Franz Welser-Möst conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in a well-played program of early 20th-century music as part of the citywide festival, “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice”. The evening opened with Konzertmusik für Blasorchester, Paul Hindemith’s first composition for wind ensemble, an example of Gebrauchmusik (functional music for amateurs), which the composer promoted to make wind and brass music more approachable to a wider public. Though designed to be played by amateurs or students, its formidable fusion of flamboyant motifs and tuneful melodies is tremendously difficult to perform. An amalgamation of complex counterpoint and intricate melodies, it is a prime example of Neoclassical musical structure.
However, the perky piece – which opens with a blasting fanfare that transitions into a whimsical march and then moves on through a set of folk tune variations and a funeral dirge to a triumphant conclusion – can also be appreciated as a tongue-in-cheek send-up of German military band music. On this occasion the Viennese musicians delivered a vivid, highly enjoyable rendition as they navigated the colorful score with extraordinary ease and clarity of line.
Next came Richard Strauss’ Symphonic Fantasy on his 1917 opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, a perfect example of his lavishly lush late Romantic style. The 21-minute-long opus, comprised, in the composer’s words, of the “best parts” of the four-hour-long allegorical opera, chronicles the tale of an immortal Empress’ attempt to steal the soul (shadow) of a mortal woman so that she may bear children. Skillfully led by Welser-Möst’s flowing gestures, the 100+ musicians who performed Strauss’ pared-down version of his operatic score had no trouble conveying both the delicacy and the grandeur of the music. This was a finely detailed, impressively controlled reading that showed the orchestra – with its glistening woodwinds, resonant brass, radiant strings, graceful harps, world-class timpani and percussion – at its finest, no more so than in the shimmering climax that faded off into an ethereally radiant coda, and in the work’s gorgeous love theme, eloquently rendered by a solo tenor trombone.
After intermission came Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, twelve short pieces that the composer labeled an applied treatise on his rigorous 12-tone method of composition. Increasingly complex and steeped in unrelenting dissonance, the work places little emphasis on traditional symphonic form and is daunting to the uninitiated. Though efficiently played by Welser-Möst and the orchestra, following on the heels of the glorious Strauss, the mournful theme with its nine concise variations and complex polyphonic finale – for all its shifting moods and shimmering colors – came off as a less than highly congenial composition.
The program ended with a high-powered performance of La Valse, Maurice Ravel’s whirling and turbulent depiction of a society on the brink of destruction. Originally conceived as a gigantic apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, as it evolved, it became not a simple homage to the dance but, in the words of the composer, a portrayal of a “fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool”. While the glamor and splendor of waltzing couples remain in the forefront of this brilliantly orchestrated score, increasingly sinister and violent events are taking place in the background. Under Welser-Möst’s baton, Ravel’s passionately seductive music emerged out of the mists and slowly coalesced into a glittering, surreal, account and built up to a thrillingly impulsive final climax that brought both the piece – and the concert – to a cataclysmic end.
