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Codebreakers
The Boston Secession cracks ‘The Stravinsky Code,’ plus the Dresden Staatskapelle at Symphony Hall
BY DAVID WEININGER

Classical music’s premier humorist, Victor Borge, had a great joke about Leonard Bernstein’s musical outreach efforts. "I heard that Mr. Bernstein won another award." Pause. "For explaining the music of Igor Stravinsky." Pause. "To Igor Stravinsky." Cue the laughter.

Of course, the folks at the Boston Secession aren’t attempting anything so exalted as explaining Stravinsky’s music (much less to the man himself). But for its program next Friday, the innovative and intrepid chorus has crafted a program called "The Stravinsky Code" designed to open up a musical idea that provided him inspiration at all points of his career.

That thread — the code of the concert title — is the octatonic scale, a modal scale made up of alternating half-steps and whole steps. (If you start on C, the scale would be C-C#-D#-E-F#-G-A-B-flat.) "What this scale accomplishes is a marvelous polytonality, a kind of determined dissonance," says Jane Ring Frank, the Secession’s music director, in an e-mail exchange. With its implication of different keys, the scale functions as a kind of midway point between tonality and atonality. "I believe that this music really creates an electric (and often tension-filled) beauty," Frank says. "My sense is that it is accessible to the ear, because there is so much for the listener to recognize, to access, to hang on to."

Frank has chosen a broad range of this ‘coded’ music. She reaches back to Stravinsky’s predecessors, including Schubert (the Sanctus from the E-flat Mass) and Mussorgsky (the Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov) and forward to his imitators ("Tempus est iocundum" from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana). And from Stravinsky’s own œuvre, she chooses from works as diverse as Petrushka (the "Shrove-Tide Fair," which she’ll play in a two-piano arrangement with the chorus’s accompanist, Scott Nicholas), the ballet Les noces, and his late 12-tone work Requiem Canticles.

The second half of the program explores Stravinsky’s pastiche style. It opens with his scandalous arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner," which is full of lush harmonies and dotted rhythms. "I am fascinated that Stravinsky wrote the arrangement as a gift to the country he loved and adopted," Frank says. For his generosity, Stravinsky was arrested for violating a law that forbade reharmonization of the National Anthem. ("The music was pulled from the music stands of the Boston Symphony Orchestra by the local police.") From there, Frank and company move through "his Verdian use of melody in Oedipus Rex, his interest in early music (as attested by his composition of two of the vocal parts in a Gesualdo motet), his sexy Tango for the piano, and his use of Rossini-like melodies in Le rossignol." To conclude, they revisit the octatonic scale in its full bloom: the final movement of Symphony of Psalms, with its overlaid triads of C major and E-flat major. And that, Frank points out, "naturally falls into Bernstein’s Quintet from West Side Story. Bernstein directly copied the Symphony’s harmonies and rhythms. So the pastiche tradition moves on. . . . "

The Boston Secession performs "The Stravinsky Code" next Friday, April 29, at 8 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 11 Garden Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $35; call (617) 499-4860.

YOU COULD ARGUE that there’s a Brahms Code as well: carefully wrought structures and dense counterpoint that disguise themselves as ardent lyricism. But unlocking that code didn’t seem to be on the agenda when the Dresden Staatskapelle arrived at Symphony Hall last Sunday, courtesy of the Bank of America Celebrity Series. The orchestra was to have been conducted by Bernard Haitink, who took over as interim music director when Giuseppe Sinopoli died in 2001. But Haitink fell into a squabble with the orchestra’s management over the choice of Sinopoli’s successor (Fabio Luisi) and withdrew from the tour, and it fell to Korean conductor Myung Whun Chung to lead the Brahms program, which opened with the Second Piano Concerto (with Emanuel Ax) and closed with the Fourth Symphony.

The scarcity of the Staatskapelle’s visits here means that it’s seldom included in the same breath as its brethren in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Vienna when the topic of Europe’s great orchestras comes up. It should be. Its sound is transparent but full of depth, with a dark sweetness in the strings, and extra weight in the cellos and basses, and gleaming brass. The players blend well, and there’s a roundedness, a luxuriance in the sound, even at the music’s biggest moments.

The big moments were plentiful. Whatever the concert might have sounded like under Haitink, it would surely have been different. Under Chung, the orchestra served up a full serving of expansive, Romantic-with-a-capital-R Brahms. Chung’s musicmaking is all about intense contrasts, big gestures, and a wide range of tempos. This allowed some moments in the symphony to come through with blistering intensity. I don’t think I’ve heard the codas to the first and the last movement played with the fury that Chung marshaled. The scherzo had a brutal, militant edge to it, which was either exciting or crude, depending on your view. It was like Brahms filtered through a Tchaikovskian lens.

But Brahms is Brahms, not Tchaikovsky, and for all the passion, plenty of other moments — the intricate motivic play and development — seemed to get left by the wayside. Phrases would simply roll one into the other. You knew how you were getting from one exit to another, but the overall sense of the trip seemed to get lost in the commotion.

The concerto fared better. The volatile Chung and the no-nonsense Ax may seem an odd couple, but the pairing brought out the best in each. Ax’s greatest asset is his clarity, and it was rewarding to hear him play with dead-on accuracy lines that often come off as a blur. He produced a sound broad and deep enough to match the orchestra’s, even at its height, and he loosened his classical leanings just enough for Chung to tighten his control over the flow of the music.

The high point was a beautifully suspended rendition of the slow movement that featured a gorgeous, warm solo from the orchestra’s first cellist, Wolfgang-Emmanuel Schmidt. Almost as soon as the final notes sounded, Ax jumped up and dragged Schmidt out to take a bow with him, and he repeated the gesture during the curtain calls that followed. It was a selfless, classy move, and a fitting end to a performance in which everyone seemed to be working toward a greater good. That should be a code of its own.


Issue Date: April 22 - 28, 2005
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