THE STAGE IS SET FOR SYMPHONY’S WAR OF ROMANTICS
Concert series reflects a conflict between factions of 19th century classical music lovers
A few years ago the Vancouver Symphony began to package a number of events into a “Spring Festival,” emphasis tending to fall on a single composer. This season the unifying idea is a theme, the so-called “War of the Romantics.” This conflict will be explored in some five concerts running through April 18.
The idea stems from a 19thcentury culture war between two factions of composers who saw themselves as Beethoven’s heirs. The “progressives” (including Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner) held that composers should be explorers and pioneers, searching out the new. The conservatives, who centred around Johannes Brahms, argued for tradition. Why jettison the wonderful ideas of the past in a quixotic quest for some sort of music of the future?
OK. So if we’re talking innovation vs. same old, same old, just what distinguishes the VSO festival concept from conventional practice? The best answers are context, concentration and diversity.
For example, playing all nine Beethoven Symphonies in the course of a single season is special emphasis, but it misses the festival ideal entirely. Tight thematic programming over the course of a few weeks is a very different experience: listeners are guided to their own epiphanies about style and content; proximity and intensity make for extra enjoyment.
The content for this spring’s concerts is an opportunity to think slightly outside the mainstream menu of starter, concerto, intermission and symphony. The War of the Romantics orchestral concerts continue Saturday sampling the work that changed it all, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, performed in Gustav Mahler’s re-orchestrated version. (Purists, panic not: Mahler tweaked rather than completely altered the masterwork.)
Another soloists/choir/orchestral repertoire favourite, Brahms’s A German Requiem, is slated for performance April 16.
Unexpected combinations are planned. Bramwell Tovey has tucked in Luciano Berio’s orchestral version of Brahms’s first clarinet sonata to accompany Beethoven’s Ninth. Liszt’s flashy tone poem Les Preludes does warm-up duty for a healthy dose of Wagner, the Ring Without Words, which ends the festival April 18.
Performing Wagner in Vancouver is something of an issue. Given that Seattle is North America’s Wagner Central, we see his operas rarely. Aside from overtures and the odd concert piece, there isn’t much other Wagner to present. Since the days of British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey, it’s been taboo to excerpt “great bleeding chunks” from the operas and exhibit them in concert settings. And — sadly, say I — opera in concert doesn’t seem to be a viable Vancouver option. What are local Wagner aficionados to do?
Well, the late conductor/composer Lorin Maazel loved his Wagner and came up with a controversial solution: Reduce the 15-plus hours of the Ring Cycle operas to a purely instrumental work of about the same duration and dimensions as a big Bruckner symphony. Keep the basic order from the opening of Das Rheingold through the end of Gotterdammerung, but (gasp!) cut all the singing.
To quote from The Ring Without Words publishers: “Maazel assigns the vocal parts to additional instruments which are associated with specific characters: the flute represents Sieglinde, Siegmund and Siegfried are characterized by the trombone and the bass clarinet is utilized as the personification of Fafner.”
The things one does for love.