11 March 2011
Playful Schafer symphony features lush, inventive score
by Robert Everett-Green
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As R. Murray Schafer tells the story, he had not yet written his latest commission for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra when someone at the TSO phoned with a pressing need to know the title. "Symphony No. 1 in C minor," he said, mischievously reaching for the kind of label that carries weight in the orchestral world, and feeling the oddness of naming the baby before it had even been conceived.
But in that moment, the idea for the piece was actually born. Schafer decided to lash himself to the mast of that portentous key, and see whether he could still steer the ship his way.
The result, heard for the first time on Thursday, was a fascinating orchestral étude disguised as a symphony in three movements. Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and others have written symphonies dominated by a recurrent theme; in Schafer's lush, inventive score, that role is played by a tonal centre. It imposed itself again and again, sometimes strengthening an apparently wayward line of thought, at other times brusquely hauling the music back into its orbit.
It also allowed Schafer to act out his dynamic affection for past musical practices and mentalities. Tonality implies a world view with a clear sense of centre and margin. Schafer exploited this to achieve some deeply satisfying climactic events that were also haloed by the faintest of quotation marks. He also enthusiastically roamed the margins, playing with a kind of exoticism popular at the end of the 19th century. Portions of all three movements felt like music for a fairy-tale ballet that Rimsky-Korsakov or Ravel had somehow neglected to write.
I doubt that the heroic narrative implications of some symphonies in C minor (Beethoven's above all) are of any personal interest to Schafer, which may be why his symphony doesn't "add up" in traditional terms. The glass has been shattered by history, and what we hear from Schafer are fragments held together by that tonal frame, and by his playful, centred sensibility.
I would gladly have heard the piece over again right away. Nothing, however, could make me want to get near another performance of Jennifer Higdon's On a Wire, a co-commission by several orchestras that featured eighth blackbird, a six-member American chamber ensemble. The best of this work came at the beginning, when the six soloists huddled over the guts of a grand piano and drew out fascinating sounds by bowing its strings with horsehair, like dentists flossing teeth.
There were a few patches of good contrapuntal writing for the solo group later on, but in the main this was a profoundly empty piece. Higdon made the players race up and down scales, jog over bits of instrumental busywork and leap over robust American rhythms as if she were leading a dancercise class with instruments. Hectic incidents and tender melodies succeeded each other with perfect cliché logic. Higdon's blithering commotions were often grounded by some held tonic note, though without any of the creativity of Schafer's dalliance with tonal order. I find it deeply depressing that a group as talented as eighth blackbird would want to play this stuff (from memory, no less), and that works of this kind are making Higdon one of the most rewarded American composers of her generation.
Conductor Peter Oundjian and the TSO performed this New Creations program with skill and attentiveness, particularly in the Schafer symphony, and in John Adams's mysterious Tromba lontana, a homage of sorts to Charles Ives, whose bicameral spirit seemed to move through the contrast between the peppy trumpet calls and the sombre theme moving through lower strings.
