If you ever wondered how today’s symphonies contrast with those of a century ago, a trip to the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium Tuesday evening to hear Alasdair Neal conduct the Marin Symphony would have been enlightening. The West Coast premiere of Lowell Liebermann’s 2010 Symphony No. 3, Op. 113 began a program that ended with Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 “New World” Symphony No. 9, Op. 95. In between was a performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the precocious 17-year-old soloist Nathan Chan, coming only nine days after another young cellist, Joshua Roman, took on the same work with the California Symphony in Walnut Creek. All the Main performances were for the most part excellent, highlighted by Neale’s and Chan’s sensitive and idiomatic understanding of Elgar’s aesthetic.
It’s nice to hear a new “symphony,” if only because the title is so uncommon today, being outnumbered by concertos, for instance, nearly 10 to one. A composer today has a better chance of getting his or her music played if a famous soloist agrees to champion a work, while a “symphony” challenges the listener to take on a work more for its abstract, formal elements than any “personality” a soloist might provide. Back in Dvořák’s time, composers were expected to “prove” themselves by constructing symphonies; today, fancy titles combined with marketing tie-ins are more successful.
It’s way too early to determine whether Liebermann’s work typifies the current state of music in America, but it does reflect today’s de-emphasis on stylistic purities or consistencies. Liebermann hates stylistic labels, insisting in a particularly lucid article: “My compositional concerns have always been primarily about formal balance and organic unity.” And such is the case with his fascinating new symphony, as it was with Dvořák’s.
Both symphonies incorporate seemingly extraneous elements into their arguments. In Dvořák’s case it’s tunes shaped by Native American, African American, and Czech folk influences. In Liebermann’s it’s dance styles: a waltz (Liebermann refers to it as “morbid”) like Sibelius’ Valse Triste, a blues number, a “walking bass” stride, and a sarabande. Both composers tie the elements together with themes, a “motto” and other recurring themes for Dvořák, and dotted ascending, whole-tone descending, and chorale motives for Liebermann.
Less Time to Say Hello/Goodbye Today
But the similarities between the works are overshadowed by their signal difference: the condensation. Liebermann (and most of his symphony-writing cohorts, excepting Philip Glass) says as much in 20 minutes as Dvořák in 50. Lieberman’s themes are less immediately grabbing, but they’re intriguing enough to make you want to hear them again. His symphony is in a single movement, with three sections of balanced moods, from what Neale remarked to the audience as “intense seriousness of purpose,” to moments “where you get the feeling you’ve crashed a New Orleans party” and hear “a demented version of the Charleston,” to a quasi-apotheosis at the end that’s undercut by “a musical question mark” of percussion taps trailing off like they do in Shostakovich’s 4th and 15th symphonies.
Both symphonies were well handled by Neale and his team, and well received by the audience. The horn section was particularly excellent in the opening movement of the Dvořák, along with the woodwinds.
Cellist Nathan Chan at 17 already has 14 years of on-stage experience, having conducted the San Jose Chamber Orchestra at age 3. He showed it with expansive gestures, but more importantly, revealed a deep musicality with his interpretation of the Elgar concerto, explained by Neale to the audience as “Elgar saying goodbye to his Edwardian world” that was destroyed by the First World War. A couple of intonation lapses and an inability to project the last pizzicato notes of the Allegro molto movement did not put him in the same league technically as Joshua Roman, whom I reviewed last week, but Chan’s heart is ahead of Roman’s in this concerto: These two outstanding young cellists would benefit from taking master classes from each other. Furthermore, Neale could show the guest conductor of the California Symphony, Robert Moody, a thing or two about how important Elgar’s ritards are in the score.
No matter how symphonies change over the years, no matter how often the use of opus numbers goes in and out of fashion, the interpreter’s main task — getting into the soul of the music — remains the greatest challenge and reward for musicians and audiences alike.