CLASSICAL
Houston Symphony celebrates Franz Schubert.
Franz Schubert was only 31 when he died. The Austrian composer’s short life was filled with personal and professional frustrations, yet he was staggeringly prolific: his output includes more than 600 art songs (or lieder), nine symphonies and 17 operas, although none of those were especially successful.
Noted for their melodic beauty and harmonic restlessness, his “Winterreise” and “Die schöne Müllerin” song cycles — the “albums” of their day — continue to be performed frequently. And in the realm of chamber music, his Quintet in A Major (the “Trout”) and Quartet in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”) rank among the best-known examples of the form. His beatific setting of “Ave Maria,” included in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” might also ring a bell.
Other works, namely Schubert’s Octet in F Major, are ripe for rediscovery.
Stretching for just over an hour, the Octet fit the bill when the Houston Symphony wanted a socially distanced substitute for “Ein Heldenleben,” Richard Strauss’ massively orchestrated tone poem riddled with callbacks to prior works, including “Also Sprach Zarathrustra” and “Don Juan.”
Eight of the orchestra’s section leaders, or principals, will perform it on Saturday; it’s the only work on the program. Only 150 symphony subscribers will be allowed into Jones Hall, but the concert will be livestreamed.
“Even though we needed to go in a direction with much smaller forces, it had to be something that is just as musically monumental,” says Rebecca Zabinski, the symphony’s director of artistic planning. “Several of our principals had mentioned the Schubert Octet to me in the past for our chamber music series, so I knew this was on their wish list.”
Besides its length, the Octet is also notable for its unusual orchestration — first and second violin, viola, cello, bass, clarinet, French horn and bassoon — and the virtuosic demands it makes on its players. Says Zabinski, “It’s an epic tour de force that pushes the musicians to their limit and will absolutely put their artistry front and center.”
The unorthodox staging also allows strings and winds to interact onstage in a way they wouldn’t at a more conventional symphony concert, explains principal cellist Brinton Averil Smith.
“Here we have a chance to play together one on one, which is not only fun but helps us know each other better as musicians,” he says. “Because of the way the orchestra sits in normal times, we are far away from each other, and playing together in the full symphony is more visual than aural. Here we can really hear each other and play together.”
To Joan DerHovsepian, the symphony’s acting principal viola, the Octet “has great presence on a symphonic scale.”
“When I’ve performed the piece or heard it as an audience member, it always feels like a celebratory event,” she adds.
Written in 1824, the Octet was first performed publicly three years later — a newspaper review at the time praised the music but criticized its excessive length — and not again until 1861. In 1948, a closing-night performance at the University of Wisconsin’s Schubert Festival caught the attention of a student named Frederic Wallace Boots. He decided to make the Octet the subject of his master’s thesis, which now resides in the crevasses of the internet.
The piece was just as obscure then as it is today and just as fascinating an example of Schubert’s multifaceted talents.
Writes Boots, “In the Octet is not only the songwriter manifest, but also the writer of military marches and beer-garden serenades, gemütlich (cozy) folk dances and courtly minuets, virtuoso variations and finely-wrought symphonic developments; music which varies in scope and emotional content as readily as it changes its harmonic color.”
“Nobody (sounds) quite like Schubert — gentler than Beethoven, but with a gift for beautiful melody that is in turns lively, uplifting and heartbreaking,” agrees Smith. “Schubert’s music seems simple and accessible, but when you look closer, there is more emotional depth than you could explore in a lifetime.”
And certainly more than enough to fill out a single evening.
Playing the Octet “feels like an evening at the most fabulous dinner party I could imagine, filled with nonstop fascinating conversation,” adds DerHovsepian. “It’s the evening I hope will never end.”