Toronto Symphony 2018-2019 # 4: Romantic Masterpieces

Last night's Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert, led by guest conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens, appeared at first glance like a trip down memory lane.

It was with something of a sensation of travelling backwards to my youth (appropriate on my birthday) that I looked over a programme that could quite easily have been presented by the orchestra in, say, 1968 or so: three solid contributions from three of the principal voices of nineteenth-century German Romanticism: Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.

It's a measure of changes in musical tastes that these composers, who held an honoured place in the pantheon of musical greats when I was young, now occupy a much more crowded field where works from many other voices are also performed and heard with more regularity than before.  Not least among those are Felix Mendelssohn's sister, Fanny, and Clara Schumann, wife of Robert and lifelong friend of Brahms.

Memory lane wasn't confined to the choice of repertoire, either, as the pattern of Overture-Concerto-Symphony defined many (most?) of the concerts I attended in the early years of my music-lover's career.  It says much for the shifting tides of musical taste that I can't remember when I last heard a concert in this conventional pattern, nor the last time I heard the Brahms Symphony No. 4 -- and I had never heard a live performance of Schumann's Manfred Overture.

Some may disagree, but I think that each of the works performed last night is indeed a masterwork, albeit each is focused in a different kind of music-making.

Some of Robert Schumann's most accomplished orchestral music came in the form of dramatic overtures.  Expressing drama through the orchestra seemed to come to him more naturally than the intellectual minutiae of symphonic form.  His overture to Manfred is quite possibly the finest of them all.  Intended as a curtain raiser to a staged production of Byron's dramatic poem, it ended by becoming a magnificent tonal portrait of Byron's brooding, conscience-ridden hero.

Steffens caught the air of haste and urgency attending the three staccato chords which open the piece.  It's a tricky moment to pull off, because the chords (which are played with no other music around them to give context) are actually placed ahead of the beat.  It's the necessity to get in fractionally ahead of the beat that creates that urgency, but it also raises the spectre of a misfired or inadequately unified chording.

The slow introduction was ideally sombre, and the subsequent allegro main tempo laden with fear and anxiety, thanks to the syncopated violin figures, clearly articulated here.  The difficult accelerando to get from slow to fast was a bit lacking in unity.

As the overture progressed, the numerous counter-melodies in the winds were all highlighted without being overplayed.  The great peroration (where the rhythmic trick of the opening chords is finally revealed) built up to a great head of steam.  In the long diminuendo after that climax, the brand-new chordal theme in the winds was on the verge of being swamped by the horns, but remained audible.  The final cadence was slowed down and quieted down until the final notes remained barely discernible.  A fine performance of a challenging work.

Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki then joined the orchestra for Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25.  Personal taste may dictate each listener's reaction to this work, but there's no denying how conclusively and totally Mendelssohn reinvented the concerto form.  In place of the modified sonata form with double exposition of the classical Mozart and Beethoven concertos, this work begins with a quick, violent uprush in the orchestra leading straight into the first theme, presented by the piano with all the virtuoso fireworks anyone could ask.  The concerto begins as it means to go on, innovating in other ways by linking the movements together -- but most of all by emphasizing the elaborate, showy piano part and reducing the orchestra to more of an accompaniment than an equal partner.

In terms of musical substance, this concerto's first and last movements are basically huge mounds of whipped-cream virtuosity.  The poetic second movement is a bird of a very different feather.  But there's really only one way to play a piece like this: hell for leather, pedal to the metal, put your head down and go for it -- BUT never forget that you're playing Mendelssohn and not Liszt.  An airy lightness of touch and restraint in the use of the sustain pedal are essential.

Needless to say, I just described Jan Lisiecki's performance of the solo part in the fast outer movements.  In the central slow movement, a "song without words" indeed, his playing was as gravely beautiful and lovingly shaped as anyone could want.  Steffens effectively led the orchestra in supporting the principal partner of the work, with lovely subtleties from strings and winds in the slow movement in particular.

After the concerto, Lisiecki responded to the enthusiastic applause and cheers with an encore, one of the piano pieces which Mendelssohn actually entitled Songs Without Words.  Here he played with a high degree of poetry and restraint alike, adding a delightful coda to the concerto's dynamism.

After the intermission, then, to the Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98, by Johannes Brahms.  Of the four Brahms symphonies, I suspect # 1 is most popular today because of its Beethovenian tragedy-to-triumph dramatic arc -- and especially because of the clear tribute to Beethoven in the main theme of the finale.  Many people have long found # 4 more problematic because it ends in a mood as tragic as its opening -- a tragedy of classical power and inevitability, cloaked in some of the richest orchestral writing Brahms ever achieved.  But it's still a dark and sombre ending to a work which has more than its share of dark colours.

There's a danger, here, that the darker sounds can become overwhelming -- in particular, the very prominent horn parts.  In the first movement, that's precisely what happened.  It's a hoary old musicians' joke that a conductor should never look at the horns, trumpets, or trombones because it encourages them.  Steffens must have been looking at the horns during rehearsals, because much of the horn playing throughout the first movement was at blastissimo volume levels.  Yes, the horn parts are glorious, and yes, the chording was both rich and secure.  But there are also some truly lovely wind counterpoints throughout the movement which often got swamped.  The odd result was that the first movement sounded in places like a concerto grosso for four horns and strings.

The other curious detail was that the horns "pulled in their horns" (sorry, I had to do it) for the remainder of the symphony, finding more of the poetry and less of the power in their music.

On an interpretive level, Steffens achieved great results by taking the first movement at a slower basic tempo than many, allowing the first great theme to sound relaxed, then finding the right energy for the dotted rhythms of the second subject, and allowing ample room for the organic growth of the music to build into a massive peroration at the end.

The slow movement brought much more poetic playing from the horns, and the most precise yet delicate pizzicati from the strings.  The rising lines of the winds at the coda were truly moving.

A robust performance of the scherzo (one of only two orchestral scherzos Brahms ever wrote) was marked by very successful shifts into and out of the slower tempo of the brief quiet episode in the middle.

And so to the finale, the most unique symphonic movement of its day, a full-throttle chaconne plainly inspired by Bach.  Here again, a slower, more relaxed tempo paid dividends in allowing each of the brief variations to register at full weight.  That tempo also allowed the gorgeous flute solo at the heart of the movement to develop a larger measure of tragic pathos than many interpreters permit.  The pathos in turn allowed the furious return of the opening bars to hammer down with even greater force.

The problematic feature at that furious return was the sudden gear shift to a notably faster tempo.  I agree that a faster speed is needed to get the work to the finish line, but a more gradual build-up over several variations from that recapitulation would work better.  No complaints about the majestic final coda, which rightly brought the most powerful playing of the evening.