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A weekend full of literary music
BY DAVID WEININGER
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It’s a given that literature has served as the muse for much of the great music of the West. What we know as classical music came largely from the desire to set sacred scripture to music, and literary products of every stripe have served composers as inspiration ever since. And composers can respond to great writing in a wide variety of forms, and with a sometimes puzzling array of artistic strategies. Hot on the heels of the BSO’s performances of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette, next week’s events show the diversity of literary music. The most direct encounter between a story and music is opera, of course, and few composers chose their sources as carefully as Benjamin Britten. Having just set Melville’s Billy Budd, he composed The Turn of the Screw in a few months for the 1954 Venice Biennale. Although Henry James’s unsettling short story doesn’t seem like a natural for an operatic setting — two characters are ghosts and have no words — the composer’s friend Myfanwy Piper wrote such a dramatically involving libretto that it’s now counted among Britten’s best texts. The Turn of the Screw is also one of his most rigorously constructed pieces of music: the entire opera is based on a 12-note theme, and each scene and its accompanying instrumental interlude constitute a variation on the theme. The variations also heighten the psychological edge of James’s sinister tale, much as similar musical procedures do in Berg’s Wozzeck. New England Conservatory Opera Theater gives three performances of the work, December 10 through 12, at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. John Greer conducts the all-student cast and orchestra and David Gately directs. Tickets are a steal at $15; call the Majestic box office at (617) 824-8000. If opera is the logical setting for prose, then the composer’s obvious response to poetry is the song, and few responded to verse with greater skill and subtlety than Schubert. During his lifetime, Schubert was known as a supreme composer of lieder; only after his death was his supremacy in other genres recognized. It’s not clear whether the song "Der Tod und das Mädchen" ("Death and the Maiden") would be so well remembered had Schubert not used it as the basis for a set of variations in his best string quartet, the D-minor, which now carries the song as its title. Mahler made a popular arrangement of the quartet for string orchestra; that along with the original song and works by Handel (Concerto Grosso Opus 6 No. 5) and Shostakovich (the spiky Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and Strings) will be on display in the New England String Ensemble’s concert at Jordan Hall next Friday, December 10, at 8 p.m. Susan Davenny Wyner conducts this Bank of America Celebrity Series "Marquee Event," for which tickets are $25 to $38; call (617) 482-6661. It’s no surprise that Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems — strict and lyrical, distant and poignant — have captured the imagination of so many contemporary composers, among them Donald Martino, Peter Lieberson, and Einojuhani Rautavaara. Harrison Birtwistle, one of Britain’s most important living composers, is the latest to take up the Rilke mantle, though in a rather unconventional way. His Orpheus Elegies consists of 26 aphoristic pieces that respond to and reflect various parts of the Sonette an Orpheus. The vast majority of them are instrumental duets for oboe and harp, though, and only half a dozen set Rilke’s words to music. That may seem like a missed opportunity given the riches of Rilke’s language, and it’ll be interesting to see whether Birtwistle’s bristlingly inventive music can carry the ideas. The Orpheus Elegies will be at the centerpiece of a Birtwistle program presented by the Harvard Music Department that will include Nenia: The Death of Orpheus, Harrison’s Clocks, and Verses for Solo Piano. That’s also on December 10 at 8 p.m., at Harvard’s Paine Concert Hall, in the Music Department building in the Law School Yard. And it’s free; call (617) 495-2791. All right, Beethoven’s cello sonatas don’t have anything to do with literature. But like so many of the works from each period of his composing career, each has a firm sense of narrative — of plot, complication, and resolution — all its own. That’s especially true of the A-major Sonata Opus 69, one of the underrated works of his middle period. It’s on the first installment of a two-concert program of Beethoven’s complete cello and piano works at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum next Sunday, December 12. (The second concert follows on December 19.) The combination of the rich tone of Steven Isserlis’s cello and Robert Levin’s period fortepiano should make for a fascinating journey. That’s at 1:30 p.m., and tickets are $20 (which includes museum admission); call (617) 278-5150.
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