It could be exhausting to provide you with a extra radically divisive main composer than Arnold Schoenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. It could be equally exhausting to provide you with a extra radically inclusive composer, who remade European music in his picture after which got here right here and did the identical for Hollywood. Or a extra devotedly progressive — you might even say obsessively progressive — composer who honored the previous but paved the way in which for a kicking-and-screaming future.
We nonetheless don’t fairly know the best way to promote Schoenberg. There may be the scary modernist Schoenberg — inventor of the 12-tone music, changing conventional concord with the democratic notion that every one notes are equal — who apparently drives audiences away. However there’s additionally the Schoenberg who carried on from the nineteenth century Romantic custom in his lush early scores like the large post-Wagnerian and post-Brahmsian “Gurrelieder.”
The large occasion ending this yr’s celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Schoenberg’s beginning was Zubin Mehta conducting the grandiose “Gurrelieder” over the weekend with an enormous Los Angeles Philharmonic (replete with 4 crimson harps), the Los Angeles Grasp Chorale and big-throated vocal soloists.
“Gurrelieder” is the primary signal of the actual Schoenberg, whose music, regardless of how thorny or how esoteric, all the time embraced the massive image relating the previous to the longer term. Dedicated to the contrapuntal wonders of Bach, the classicism of Mozart and the astonishment of Beethoven, Schoenberg started his profession by mending the most important divide of his personal early years, that of Wagner the futurist and Brahms the keeper of custom.
In Brahms, Schoenberg discovered progressivist harmonic considering that was logically heading towards atonality. As soon as when acknowledged by a stranger who requested him if he was the composer Arnold Schoenberg, he replied, “Someone has to be.” From Wagner, Schoenberg acquired the bug for infinite thematic improvement, from one factor resulting in the subsequent and the subsequent within the path towards rapture.
In no work does Schoenberg embrace the spirits of Brahms and Wagner extra radiantly than in a “Gurrelieder.” Over an opulent two hours, this quasi-oratorio is an enormous fats superb mess, and no conductor loves it greater than Mehta. At 88, Mehta is the dean of Schoenberg conductors. When he turned music director of the L.A. in 1962, on the age of 26, he informed the press that he felt it extra essential in L.A. to conduct all of the uncared for orchestra works of Schoenberg earlier than doing all of the Beethoven symphonies.
By the late Sixties he was nicely into his Schoenberg advocacy. He performed the primary L.A. Phil efficiency of “Gurrelieder” in 1968 within the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, across the identical time he was making sonic-spectacular recordings of early and late Schoenberg, catnip to audiophiles that impress to at the present time, with the orchestra in Royce Corridor at UCLA. That’s additionally the place Schoenberg occurred to have taught college students who went on to change into Hollywood movie composers, experimentalists or each. David Raksin (composer of “Laura”) and John Cage stated they worshiped Schoenberg like a god.
Mehta had final performed “Gurrelieder” with the L.A. Phil in 1977, his penultimate season as music director. He concluded his 13-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic with “Gurrelieder” in 1991 and recorded it. 20 years later, Mehta recorded “Gurrelieder” once more, this time with the one different orchestra of which he has been music director, the Israel Philharmonic.
In the meantime “Gurrelieder” has proved a favourite for 3 of Mehta’s successors on the L.A. Phil. André Previn was speculated to conduct it in 1991 however took in poor health and was changed by Gerard Schwarz. Esa-Pekka Salonen led a stunning “Gurrelieder” in Disney Corridor in 2005. Gustavo Dudamel had hoped to conduct his first “Gurrelieder” in 2020; that was canceled due to COVID.
Mehta’s “Gurrelieder” has, with age, naturally grown much less flamboyant and extra reflective. He related it with Brahms by conducting Brahms’ Violin Concerto (with soloist Leonidas Kavakos) and Second Symphony the week earlier than. He marshaled the big forces of “Gurrelieder” seated on the rostrum.
The L.A. Phil performs Schoenberg’s gargantuan “Gurrelieder,” at Walt Disney Live performance Corridor
(Carlin Stiehl/For the Instances)
Although not as demonstrative as he as soon as was, Mehta has not misplaced the essence of his L.A. Phil sound. There it was, huge and daring, from the primary agency notes of Brahms’ concerto to the searing, earth-shattering dawn grandeur of the finale of “Gurrelieder.”
It’s a loopy work, begun in 1900 in an try to out-Wagner Wagner however not accomplished for 11 years, throughout which period Schoenberg had moved towards atonality and modernism. A king, Waldemar, in an sad marriage, has an affair with a lover, “Tove.” She dies. He can not face life with out her. He dies, and within the afterlife he’s pressured to hunt all day. It will get weirder and extra surreal with a narrator for the ending.
As a really last-minute alternative for tenor Brandon Jovanovich, who caught a type of viruses floating round L.A., John Matthew Myers proved a powerful fast research as a sturdy Waldemar. Christine Goerke as Tove and Violeta Urmana as a prescient Wooden Dove, although not all the time regular, introduced Wagnerian robustness within the different two main roles. There was extra character to Gabriel Manro’s peasant and significantly Gerhard Siegel’s idiot. Dietrich Henschel was a extra melodic narrator than most.
However the glory goes to the orchestra and Los Angeles Grasp Chorale, which appeared to present Mehta all he requested for and perhaps extra. Ultimately, Mehta let “Gurrelieder” communicate for itself in a really loud voice.
That’s a technique of constructing the Schoenberg case. There are others. Schoenberg hangs over L.A. greater than we frequently understand. 4 days earlier than “Gurrelieder,” Piano Spheres, which was based by pianist and Schoenberg assistant Leonard Stein 30 years in the past, opened a tribute program remembering pianist Susan Svrcek and composer Frederick Lesemann with Webern’s eight-hand association for 4 pianists at two pianos of the opening of “Gurrelieder.” It enticingly glittered as a lot as a four-harped orchestra.
In February, the Jacaranda new music collection, shutting down after 20 years of indispensable concert events, went out with a Schoenbergian bang, connecting the composer to Hollywood, Mahler, Coltrane and Boulez. However maybe essentially the most intriguing connecting of Schoenberg to Hollywood would be the West Coast premiere of Tod Machover’s opera “Schoenberg in Hollywood,” which UCLA will mount in a brand new manufacturing on the Nimoy in Could — and, in fact, will rehearse in UCLA’s Schoenberg Corridor.