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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Strange Worlds, Familiar Sounds March 14, 2002
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By Jeff Rosenfeld
Not often does historical precedent burden a new work as heavily as it does Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' Symphony No. 8, the "Antarctic Symphony," which received its U.S. premiere last week when the composer led the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Hall. Any symphonist has to live up to his own past, of course, and for Maxwell Davies that includes a lengthy list of high-profile symphonic commissions over the last two decades, not to mention his notoriety as a radical composer of the 1960s. Furthermore, "Antarctica" is not some abstract concept here: the symphony was jointly commissioned by the British Antarctic Survey — a scientific organization — and the Philharmonia Orchestra in honor of the 50th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams' own Antarctic Symphony (No. 7 in his series).
As if history weren't enough to deal with, Maxwell Davies had politics and celebrity against him as well. The commissioning organizations touted this composition as an attempt to bridge the gap between arts and sciences — a noble goal, to be sure. As part of the bargain, Maxwell Davies was shipped southward on a month's working holiday amid the penguins and ice in 1997-98. The event has received extraordinary popular attention. The composer's diaries were published on the internet (and are still a few clicks away at his highly polished website, www.maxopus.com) and excerpts from these reports, along with a few notes from the score, were transformed into a series of postage stamps. To top everything off, the world premiere in May 2001 was a major event, a 50th birthday salute to Royal Festival Hall in London.
In remarks prefacing Friday's performance, Maxwell Davies added to his extramusical burden. He made explicit what anyone would assume: that the high-profile voyage on an icebreaker and lonely camping on bleak ice fields were meant to lend authenticity to this music. Most of us will never know, or care, and in any case it will take a few more hearings for me to figure out if all the travel and hullaballoo were realized in purely-artistic terms. Certainly, Vaughan Williams could claim no "authenticity;" he never saw Antarctica. His Antarctic Symphony was stitched together from music he wrote for a docudrama of the ill-fated second Scott expedition to the South Pole. In fact he wrote the film score before he saw any of the footage and his symphony is stirring because it is not about a place, really, but about the heroism and courage of a gritty band of scientific adventurers. It is truly grand, expressing the homebound romanticism about far-away worlds. Maxwell Davies, by contrast, composed the real Antarctica, or at least his personal experience of it, but notes that "the new symphony…is an abstract work, using transmuted sound images distantly based on those experiences." Distant or not, this 40-minute, one-movement work is loaded with sound images — so many of them that the melodic and harmonic content are frequently disrupted rather than enhanced by the endless resourcefulness of the huge percussion battery (builder's scaffolding, broken glass in a tin, various cymbals, marimba, bells and crotales, brandy glasses — you name it). Maxwell Davies depicts the breaking of ice, the electric crackling of glaciers, the powdered silence after avalanches, and the eerie light of a world beyond normal experience. He slowly develops and punctuates ideas over stretched spans of time. This seemed to evoke a place where the delight of some senses is possible only at the harsh denial of others, and where strange life forms seem to slow time itself to adapt to the hostility of climate. The duality between delight and discomfort is also expressed in the orchestration and in wide dynamic contrasts. Maxwell Davies makes monotonous use of the majority of the orchestra — its strings relegated to a tremolo here and a slide there and otherwise a lot of long unadorned notes — while melodic fragments bubble forth constantly from the few. The brass frequently hammer the quiet with bits of fanfare and the winds run about occasionally with glittering clarity. The orchestra rose brilliantly to these virtuosic needs as well as to long, tender melodies in the solo strings and winds. The bassoon and piccolo solos, as well as an extended Nielsen-esque rampage on the timpani, were foremost among many highlights. If, indeed, Maxell Davies felt "isolation, desolation, and magic" in Antarctica, as he told the audience on Friday, then the symphony is a superb realization of his stay on the ice.
These disjointed, superficial aspects of the music emerge most readily in a first hearing. Below this sometimes-icy surface there is also a structure: long slow passages slowly evolving their thematic material, then interrupted by a large-scale alternation with scherzo-like passages. At its best the music has strong underlying pulsations — like a timpani-led march about two-thirds of the way into the piece. (I couldn't help but think of this as a nod toward Allan Petterson's long, monumental and bleak symphonies, but they often sustain tension much better than this one). There is also recurring, evolving material to bind the fragments: for instance, the jaunty tune in the piccolo (a Maxwell Davies trademark from his overtly Scottish pieces, along with the trombone glissandi; only Malcolm Arnold seemed to love these devices as much). This music echoes throughout the orchestra (even in the percussion) as does, more significantly, the plainsong "Dum complerentur dies pentecostes." This is the "bedrock" of the piece, perhaps, and as in other works of Maxwell Davies, the medieval overtones can float lyrically or weigh mightily in the instrumental fabric. The symphony ends quietly in a beautiful, brief unwinding. Maxwell Davies claims that this episode is inspired by the horrific vision of the melting of the ice sheet and exposure of underlying bedrock. I didn't sense a global warming catastrophe, but rather heard an attempt to leave the music unresolved. This device is typical in Maxwell Davies' music. His penchant for declaring work unfinished is part and parcel of his extraordinary inventiveness at developing simple melodies into complex worlds. He is never really finished because his ideas keep coming to him.
In this case, though, the ideas don't really gel for the listener. Simply put, this is not the best we've heard from Maxwell Davies. History sheds a cruel light on this piece, as far as I can tell. Where Vaughan Williams had his narrative, Maxwell Davies' Antarctica is about sensory deprivation and overload. He was by all accounts the perfect composer for this commission. His music since the early 1970s has had a strong sense of place (usually Scotland), nature (the birds and the sea) and human spirit (exquisitely lyrical and relentessly developmental). In fact, he was so perfect for this commission that all he needed to do was dust off a few old ideas in the service of a new setting. As a result, he didn't get around to making very clear musical sense out of this new context. The composer's previous work makes better use of nearly the same percussion forces. (Has anyone used the cotales and glockenspiel more frequently than he?) Go back to the first symphony and you'll hear a similar orchestration and very similar musical intent-the ever-evolving transformation of medieval thematic material along with high-glare percussion and winds and the overlay of the Orkneys and the sea. But it's all so much more gripping in that work from 25 years ago, even at 150% the length of the new work. Same with the slightly shorter, more concentrated cello concerto, a more recent work with very similar runs and fanfares in the winds used so much more strikingly in conjunction with just about the same type of eerie string effects. And consider too the oboe concerto, where Maxwell Davies is so much more inventive in his patiently-evolving and infinitely-caring setting of the same Pentecostal plainsong that he uses in the Antarctic Symphony. Despite its auspicious purposes, the new symphony seems to say the same thing in much the same way as other works by this composer. Only the freshness seemed to be missing.
If Maxwell Davies was trying to take us to new places, Garrick Ohlsson, the piano soloist of the first half of the program, actually got us there with much less effort, it seemed. The repertoire, with Maxwell Davies conducting the accompaniment, was not at all exotic: Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 14 in E-flat major, K. 449, and Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in D major for the Left Hand. Ohlsson's virtues are familiar to Bay Area audiences, too, but they were refreshing nonetheless. His Mozart was marked not only by the even, warm, easy tone Ohlsson summoned from the keyboard, but more importantly by a rock-steady sense of rhythm and pulse. Ohlsson's pacing was unhurried and exact, without a trace of impetuosity or misplaced energy. He took his audience as far from the struggle and discontent as was possible. This was a vision of classicism that seemed extreme in its idealistic polish but was never unfeeling. Maxwell Davies led the strings in richly-rounded and well-balanced accompaniment that matched Ohlsson's approach perfectly. In the Ravel the accompaniment also had its virtues. A missed entrance here and a few unclear passages there stood in the way of perfection, but there was plenty of fabulous playing anyway, such as the gorgeous opening contrabassoon solo, the English horn solos, and the resplendent string basses and brass. Ohlsson's virtuosity with the left hand was as rock steady and propulsive yet unforced as it had been with two hands in the Mozart. Unlike the sprawling Antarctic symphony, with its representational effects, in the Ravel everything, hammered, bowed or blown, created a mellifluous world of tightly-related sounds that was as foreign from the everyday world as was possible. (Jeff Rosenfeld is an oboist with the Kensington Symphony, West County Winds, and Pacific Wind Ensemble. He is a freelance science journalist and author of the recent book, Eye of the Storm: Inside the World's Deadliest Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Blizzards.) ©2002 Jeff Rosenfeld, all rights reserved |
