Dazzling peaks fail to cohere in ‘Alpine’
One of Richard Strauss’ more weirdly impertinent gestures was his decision to bestow the title “An Alpine Symphony” on a work that bears at best a tenuous relationship to the symphonic tradition. (Another is that indefinite article, which suggests that there are other Alpine symphonies floating around somewhere.)
The composer’s massive orchestral work — which got a suitably colorful and somewhat overbearing performance in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday afternoon, April 12, from the San Francisco Symphony under debuting conductor Daniel Harding — is, instead, a sort of musical photo album. Over the course of nearly an hour’s worth of virtuoso writing, Strauss shows us images from his hike up a mountain and back home again.
The scenery is breathtaking. We witness a glistening sunrise, expanses of meadowland, rivulets and waterfalls, panoramic vistas and even a thunderstorm, before Strauss deposits us back in
our comfortable parlor, to sip a nightcap and read Nietzsche by the fireside.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I like looking at people’s travel snaps — up to a point. Then I start wondering what it all adds up to.
There is certainly no denying the technical brilliance of Strauss’ mastery of the orchestra. At this juncture in his career — with the early, literary tone poems behind him and the shift to a full focus on opera just getting under way — his ability to deploy instrumental resources for pictorial ends is at a high point.
In “An Alpine Symphony,” that means drawing on a vast array of performing forces that includes multiple woodwinds and brass, an organ, giant machines to depict wind and thunder, and even a handful of cowbells for the pasture scene. The composer’s control of harmonic nuance, and his ability to find just the right melody for any given moment, never fail.
From moment to moment, both Harding and the orchestra responded with alacrity to the work’s shifting demands. Big Technicolor gestures registered with a punch, the strings conjured up a warm, suave texture, and there were piercingly eloquent solo turns by (among others) oboist Eugene Izotov and trumpeter Mark Inouye.
But 50 minutes’ worth of moments is a lot of moments, and neither Harding nor Strauss did much to knit them together into a coherent dramatic structure. When a composer like Beethoven (in his Sixth Symphony) or Mahler (in the First or Third) brings capital-N Nature into a musical embodiment, they do it with one eye on the internal formal logic of the symphony. Strauss is more apt to say things like, “You’ll never guess what happened next!” as he clicks through to the next slide.
Harding’s atomistic approach was at least in sync with the composer’s here. In Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, which occupied the first half of the program, a similar tendency resulted in stretches of fussy detail that rarely took flight.
In the first and third movements especially, Harding seemed to have something specific and urgent to say about each individual measure, which made for a lot of trees and not much forest. Pianist Paul Lewis, making his Symphony debut as soloist, responded with a blandly efficient performance that sprang to life only in the sweet-toned central slow movement.
The composer’s control of harmonic nuance, and his ability to find just the right melody for any given moment, never fail.