Tone Poem Traversal at the BSO
Written for and published by the Boston Musical Intelligencer on 26 October 2024
Sir Antonio Pappano helmed the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday night in masterful traversals of tone poem works: Hannah Kendall’s North American premiere of her O flower of fire, Liszt’s lyrically strophic Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major, (a quasi-tone poem by the inventor of the form) with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist, and in Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra – for some, the apotheosis of the tone poem.
Composer Hannah Kendall (Winslow Townson photo)
Kendall’s O flower of fire (taken from Guyanese-Caribbean poet Martin Carter’s Voices) prologued the evening. With an unpretentious address to the audience, London / Wembley-raised Kendall explained the intent of her composition to depict in sound questions on post-colonial Guyanese identity, creolization, and general syncretic relationships. Syncretism well-suited most especially to musical forms of expression, listeners were met with instrumental effects, extended techniques, and an overarching feeling of languorous equatorial humidity. The comprehensive intent of this work is best captured in Kendall’s appended phrase in the score, from Carter’s poetry: “the strange dissolution of shape into spirit.” Tepidly received, it might benefit from relistening and further analysis to understand the relationships and effects therein.
Here Pappano showed rigorous but unvexed direction of the complex score, conducting with expert control of all cues, detail, and polyrhythms — all the manifold things that make nightmares for most conductors. The four harps on stage featured most notably in their indicated use of “Afro combs for strumming the harp strings,” sounds referring to the African mbira. Kendall jam packed the 20-minutes with harmonicas, multiphonic brass entrances, mouth pieces played sans corps, familiar tunes such as the “Blue Danube” played from 15 music boxes (superimposed and intentionally lost in the sonic fray), and more. Such use of the symphony orchestra poses aesthetic questions on the artform itself: even when filtered through the intentionally narrative guise of a tone poem, does orchestral music require an elaborate manifesto, or can musical expression alone present ineffable truths beyond the mere totemic? Is symphonic music best served when the orchestra is relegated to the role of mere art installation?
Franz Liszt’s single-movement Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major provided a further stylistic, though related, counterpoint in expression. It premiered with Liszt conducting his student Hans von Bronsart in 1857 at the court in Weimar. With final revision completed in 1861 from sketches first dating to 1839, one can hear the full iteration of Neudeutsche Schule style as represented by Liszt himself, Wagner, Berlioz, and others. Lambasted for their excesses of orchestration, this school certainly eschewed the Leipzig School of Classicism, as exemplified by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. Yet in this work, one finds a sensibility seemingly more Classical than Romantic, at least to contemporary ears. This concerto arguably begins the composer’s transformation from enfant terrible into the gently penitent Abbé of the early 1860s.
Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet elevated the conflicts of expression: vigorous and vehement in his capricious bombast alongside tender moments of suave, carefree Romantic abandon. Energy sometimes came at the expense of architectural structure, a perfect union perhaps unnaturally found in the familiar Deutsche Grammophon BSO recording with Zimmermann and Ozawa. Pappano stood as an equal partner in his accompaniment. Instrumental solos melded with Thibaudet to sonic perfection, tones perfectly woven: notable solos from clarinet Thomas Martin, oboe Keisuke Wakao, concertmaster Alexander Velinzon, and a glorious duet between principal cello Blaise Déjardin and the pianist carried the work to heights of intimate concertante chamber music. Thibaudet accompanied in these solo moments with exemplary union.
Thibaudet greeted his standing ovation with a salut d’amour to the Abbé, in Liszt’s own Third Consolation, S. 172. Consolation it was indeed. While Liszt has sometimes been derided for his excess as part of the New German School, this performance made a strong assertion for Liszt as the conservative liberal and successor to Beethovinian thematic innovation through lyrical transformation. [On Friday afternoon Thibaudet encored with Elgar’s equally consoling Salut d’Amour, as arranged by the pianist’s teacher Aldo Ciccolini.]
Sir Antonio Pappano, conductor and Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano (Winslow Townson pnoto)
Another leaf on the same stylistic family tree is Richard Strauss. In his Also sprach Zarathustra, as closer to this cycle, Strauss gives his own style of spin to aesthetic questions in using his philosophic response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s namesake text as compositional impetus. Just as Kendall’s work had been, Zarathustra proved a masterstroke in orchestration. A more hermetic puzzle than his other more “popular” tone poems, Strauss’s 1896 work captures him in the throes of his fin de siècle exuberance before transfiguring himself into the 20th-century bourgeois protégé of the late-Romantic tradition.
The famous opening sunrise shown bright in luminous rays from the organ, the imagery of Zoroaster on the mount clearly visible. Pappano controlled with drama, almost seeming to speak the rhythms to the BSO musicians alongside his conducting. He sculpted the meandering narrative from scene to scene through heights of lyricism and unyielding belligerence. Straussian gesangsvoll met alongside his trademark contrapuntal penchant, most especially in the fugal Von der Wissenschaft episode, which started in the basses at a marvelously lugubrious tempo. Wagnerian excess gave way to chromatic churnings, the slither of divisi strings anticipating Rosenkavalier, bells, the ponderous 32ft. tone of the “Space Odyssey” organ, confident brass entrances, impeccable solos throughout (most notable a wildly virtuosic Velinzon in Das Tanzlied) and the bravura high Cs from principal trumpet Thomas Rolfs. C major or B minor — the two main keys for thematic interplay – remained resolute in their non-resolution at the end. The harsh tritone on C and F sharp — this time suggesting B major — must assuredly have jarred listeners at Zarathustra’s premiere, as it still did this evening.