Poetry in music

Mahler, Wheeler, and Schubert

by Lloyd Schwartz

The opening notes of the Cleveland Orchestra's performance of Mahler's First Symphony (Celebrity Series) suggested that it wasn't going to be the kind of Mahler performance I like. Instead of the stirrings of woodland creatures Mahler was depicting in a "spring without end" (his original title for this movement), I heard only flutes and clarinets playing pianissimo, without much storytelling impulse (and Mahler's inspiration for his first symphony was a novel, Jean Paul's Titan). Yet this turned out to be a performance I loved. There was a narrative, but it was musical rather than literary: the story of how a symphony (this symphony) gets from those first awakening notes (not birds) to the final climactic ensemble. When it came it lifted the audience to its collective feet. And that ovation had begun to be earned as early as those opening pianissimos in the flutes and clarinets.

The Cleveland's music director, Christoph von Dohnányi, was not giving us a psychological Mahler First in the light of Mahler's later symphonies but a fresh look at the work of a young genius who was following in the footsteps of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and (though somewhat less so) Brahms. He made audible the classical structures, even the squareness that Mahler would abandon. Dohnányi underlined the dramatic contrasts in the musical architecture, both within each movement and between whole movements. When quotations from the opening of the symphony returned in fragments near the end, they were all the more poignant because their initial statements had been so clearly placed.

Dohnányi's musical integrity, and seriousness, kept him from overstating the grotesquerie. So if I missed, say, Mahler's satiric thrust in the double-bass solo that triggers the third-movement funeral march ("Bruder Martin," the German minor-key version of "Frère Jacques"), or the inebriated dissipation of the klezmer music, it was refreshing to hear how beautiful the bass (Scott Haigh) can sound, and the respect with which this Jewish wedding was treated (without the dance music's losing its lilt); and with what moving tenderness the intervening pianissimo Trio (which quotes Mahler's Wayfarer song about the linden tree) took its place in this narrative of musical styles.

Dohnányi now divides the violins, antiphonally, in historically informed 19th-century fashion. This, of course, allows one to hear a dialogue between first and second violins in the first movement (impossible to perceive when all the violins are massed in one section). But it also gives the violins a gossamer transparency that allows whatever is being played behind them a rare and shining clarity. From harp and flutes and sweet-voiced clarinets to off-stage trumpets and annunciatory horn calls, from an entire brass section that isn't there merely to prove how well hung it is (what delicate trills at the end of the folklike second movement) to the glorious sheen and warmth of all the strings, the Cleveland Orchestra remains at the top of my list of the greatest -- most musical -- American orchestras.

The Mahler was preceded by the Boston debut of the superb German baritone Olaf Bär in a fascinating round of mainly not-so-familiar Schubert songs (it's the Schubert bicentennial, after all). Some were plausibly orchestrated by Brahms and Webern -- the Brahms humbly sounding more like Mendelssohn than Brahms, the Webern subtle, austere, and compelling in texture, especially in the joined timbres of cellos and horns in one of Schubert's last songs, "Ihr Bild" ("Her Picture"). But several were ineptly orchestrated by Wagner assistant Felix Mottl and a couple of hacks -- Robert Fanta and Kurt Gillman -- about whom no information was provided and who delivered the 19th-century equivalent of muzak: goopy flutes and harp in "Du bist die Ruh" ("You Are Repose"), melodramatic timpani in "Der Wanderer," oom-pah-pah horns in "Ganymed." These didn't help the songs (which need no orchestra), or Bär, who at least transcended the absurdities with equanimity and grace. He's one of the most forthright and knowing lieder singers of our day -- a perfect accomplice for Dohnányi and the orchestra. He made me long to hear him in a long-overdue complete recital.

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Composer Scott Wheeler, director of the new-music group Dinosaur Annex, had something of a mini-festival last week. Alea III and Phantom Arts both programmed a Wheeler piece, and at the First and Second Church, Emerson College sponsored a concert celebrating faculty accomplishments with a full evening of Wheeler performed by some longtime friends and associates. Wheeler, who served as MC, lamented that despite all his efforts to avoid a conflict, the one thing he hadn't thought of was the Super Bowl. Still, the church was packed with people enjoying themselves.

Wheeler is not large-scaled and cosmic in the tradition of Mahler. He's rather a disciple of Virgil Thomson (literally) and even Stephen Sondheim -- his works are appealingly modest, witty, elegant, and tuneful. Very American, spiked with a splash of French vermouth and a lemon twist. There was a piano solo, Flow Chart -- "the kind of music I like to play," Wheeler said, naming Haydn, Bach, Schubert, and jazz as influences; it was played generously by its dedicatee, Donald Berman, whom Wheeler called "luxury casting." There were two chamber pieces -- Shadow Bands, with violinist Cyrus Stevens, violist Anne Black, and cellist Michael Curry, and Dragon Mountain, with Berman joining this trio -- and two song cycles, all written between 1991 and 1993.

Typically, Wheeler surrounds asymmetrical rhythmical nuggets with soaring legato phrases. There's a slightly new-age quality to the lyricism, and a kind of minimalism in the repeated nuggets. But Wheeler's haunted harmonies are all his own. Dragon Mountain, a three-movement gem made up of the "leftovers" from a children's opera called The Little Dragon, incorporates Celtic folk elements of mysterious eloquence.

I've taken Wheeler to task before for not using more-contemporary texts. His two cycles set poems by Mark Van Doren (Serenata) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (Wasting the Night). Depending on your poetry politics, you could argue that their formal conservativism is either passé or neglected. Millay's poetry is underrated, Van Doren's not underrated enough (he owes too much to Millay -- and not enough). Soprano Nancy Armstrong was the perfect advocate for the Millay, singing these nostalgic and cynical love songs with wry understanding, dead-on pitch, and diction you could take dictation from. I loved her refusal to sink into coyness in the famous "Recuerdo" ("We were very tired, we were very merry -- /We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry"). Anthony Tommasini -- pianist, Virgil Thomson biographer, NY Times critic (formerly of the Boston Globe) -- was her sympathetic and glistening accompanist and partner. Wheeler, I thought, couldn't rescue Van Doren's poems from their disingenuous artificiality (had Van Doren ever really been in love?), though Marshall Hughes, sounding more like a folk singer than a classical tenor, and guitarist John Muratore tried their best.

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In his 31 years, Schubert wrote nearly a thousand songs. He didn't have infallible taste in poems either, but he made an amazing number of them come alive. Some of his greatest were performed at Harvard's Paine Hall by soprano Jayne West with Craig Smith at the piano on January 31, Schubert's 200th birthday (and Smith's 50th), in a concert sponsored by WGBH and hosted by Classical Performances' Richard Knisely (who later, with Megan Henderson, played Schubert's greatest work for piano four-hands, the tragic -- and ferociously difficult -- F-minor Fantasy). West needed several songs to warm up her lovely pure tone. One, "Der Flug der Zeit" ("The Flight of Time"), seemed a bit low for her, and perhaps that discomfort made her expression seem more willful than natural. She was more genuine in the ghost story of "Schwestergruß" ("Sister's Greeting"), the innocent but knowing comedy of "Seligkeit" ("Bliss"), and an especially heavenly "Im Frühling" ("In Springtime"). Smith talked a little about the way Schubert can sound buoyant even at his most tragic and how there's a little "tug" of melancholy even at his most joyful. Smith captured that very mixture of emotions in his pearly, purling accompaniment.

The extraordinary Borromeo Quartet (Nicholas Kitchen, Ruggero Allifranchini, Hsin-Yun Huang, and Yeesun Kim) opened the program with the glorious single-movement Quartettsatz. Kitchen and Kim -- whose expressive face and eyes (even closed) mirrored everything she played, especially in some sexy and teasing musical dialogues with Kitchen (they're married) -- then joined pianist Randall Hodgkinson to close the program with one of the most sublime of all chamber works, Schubert's moving and mysterious E-flat Trio (the one Stanley Kubrick used so evocatively in Barry Lyndon). Hodgkinson is an excellent player, but in the first movement I thought he domesticated one of Schubert's most chilling, unearthly passages by not revealing how different it is from what surrounds it. The climax of the second movement Andante was overwhelming, however, and the uncanny moment in the jubilant last movement, when the aching cello theme from the slow movement returns, was devastating. What better present could a composer get on his 200th birthday?