Beethoven joke sets stage for real thing
People who spend any time in concert halls, and honestly many who don’t, have a certain amount of Beethoven’s music rattling around freely in their heads. Snatches of melody, rhythmic tags, perhaps just good old “duhduhduhDUM” — it’s all in there in disconnected clumps, ready to prompt bursts of nostalgic recognition.
That sensation of snippets knocking around is what forms the premise of “Con brio,” an exuberantly witty and insinuating orchestral curtainraiser from 2008 by the German composer Jörg Widmann. The piece throws those little musical fragments into a cocktail shaker, then spills them out onto the table to delight the listener.
“Con brio” worked its magic in Davies Symphony Hall on the afternoon of Thursday, Jan. 23, as the Russian conductor Dima Slobodeniouk made a winningly assured debut with the San Francisco Symphony. As rare as it is to hear a composer of any period working in a vein of buoyant humor, it’s just as rare for a conductor to recognize that humor and know how to play it.
The world of orchestral music, after all, has this in common with that of the stage: Comedy everywhere is hard.
It’s not that “Con brio” is laughoutloud funny — far from it. Rather, Widmann’s 12minute score is like an extended bout of mild, subtle tickling, which is why it needs such a firm but delicate touch.
The tickling takes the form of an elaborate, elusive dance of memory and recognition. Sometimes a single chord or a few notes of a melody will be drawn directly from a particular Beethoven symphony or concerto, and you can sit up with a firm, satisfied, “aha.”
Far more often, though, Widmann conjures up something — an instrumental combination, a rhythmic turn — that isn’t exactly by Beethoven, but might as well be. Were you supposed to be able to identify that? Maybe, but, oops, too late, it’s gone.
On top of that, Widmann adds a layer of modernday techniques such as having the
As rare as it is to hear a composer working in a vein of buoyant humor, it’s just as rare for a conductor to know how to play it.
woodwind and brass players blow air in a toneless rush through their instruments, and adopts a contemporary collage outline whose freedom makes a marked contrast to the inexorable logic of Beethoven’s sonata form.
The result, in the orchestra and Slobodeniouk’s vivacious account, sounded like a 21st century Beethoven, mysteriously brought back to life and poking gentle fun at his former self.
“Con brio” was written for a Munich concert that also featured Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, and those are the pieces referenced most directly. So putting at least the Seventh on the same program was a welcome choice, and it paid off even more handsomely thanks to Slobodeniouk’s crisp, impeccably controlled performance.
Sleekness and clarity, in fact, seem to be Slobodeniouk’s stockintrade. In the Sibelius
Violin Concerto, he and soloist Sergey Khachatryan had evidently worked out a complementary division of roles by which the orchestra remained levelheaded and pokerfaced and left the emotional effusions to the violin.
That led, most notably, to a brilliant account of the concerto’s opening pages, with the orchestra playing the initial accompaniment at the very edge of inaudibility and the solo violin seeming to emerge like a willo’thewisp out of the mists. Khachatryan made good use of his freedom in the middle movement as well, shaping the solo lines with rhapsodic urgency.
But the Beethoven onetwo — first in Widmann’s ingratiating jest, and then in the wellheeled original strains of Beethoven’s Seventh — felt like the crux of the matter. The year 2020, marking Beethoven’s 250th anniversary, is going to be full of such moments; we might as well get used to them right away.