Mendelssohn, Bruch, Stock, and Strauss: Gerard Schwarz, cond., Elmar Oliveira, violin, Seattle Symphony, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 14.6.2007 (BJ)

 

Focused in other respects on German romanticism, the program diverged from that tradition to offer the world premiere of David Stock’s Fifth Symphony. Born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, where he still lives, Stock is one of Gerard Schwarz’s many enthusiasms on the contemporary composing scene: he spent a season as the Seattle Symphony’s composer in residence ten years ago, and he contributed one of the most enjoyable pieces–a reworking of Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary–to the orchestra’s innovative recent CD “Echoes,” a joint venture with another Seattle institution, the Starbucks coffee empire, designed to extend the reach of “classical” music into new territories.

Stock is something of a maverick among today’s American composers. There is a populist side to his music, but to dismiss his claims to serious consideration on that ground would be a mistake. Certainly his Fifth Symphony is a piece distinguished not just by skillful workmanship and some striking orchestral effects but also by an impressive toughness of mind. He began writing it, his program note relates, in the autumn of 2001, at first envisaging a relatively modest work, but then, “in the aftershock of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, a war symphony seemed all too appropriate.”

The result is a compact 20-minute structure, freely chromatic in idiom, and subtitled –after the famous C-major Mass by Haydn– “In tempore belli” (“In time of war”). There are five movements, played without a break, the fourth and fifth of which are linked by a partly improvised percussion cadenza. Much of the work, punctuated by stertorous and somewhat Stravinskyan repeated-noted interjections for massed forces, is uncompromisingly abrasive in tone. The second movement, however, marked “Calm, but still intense,” is a slow meditation whose tone of passionate aspiration never obscures an underlying current of desperation. In this movement’s juxtaposition of poignant woodwind solos with some remarkably beautiful string writing, an affinity with the Walton of that composer’s First Symphony might be detected, just as for Stock’s “Calm, flowing, mysterious” finale the deep, bare sonorities of the more desolate passages in Holst’s Planets and Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica furnish some precedent. But Stock’s own personality has placed its own strongly individual stamp on the whole. Perhaps most impressive of all is the way, despite frequent passages that deliberately eschew any kind of traditional harmonic movement, the symphony never loses its forward momentum. This is achieved by highly ingenious shifts of meter and of interlocking tempos that seem utterly inevitable even while repeatedly shocking the listener’s ear into new channels of thought and motion.

My preliminary look at and subsequent revisiting of the score suggest that the performance Schwarz drew from his orchestra was commendably faithful, but more important than fidelity to the letter was the spirit of this reading: dramatic, vital, and searingly comprehensive in its command of every last expressive turn in this most impressive work. The first half of the program had consisted of two Scottish-related works: Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture and Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, with Elmar Oliveira a fluent violin soloist. Neither of these performances was quite impeccable in terms of orchestral execution. But in the Stock symphony and in the suite from Strauss’ Rosenkavalier that followed it the occasional touches of roughness were banished, the horn section in particular rising brilliantly to the occasion in the slithery harmonies of Stock’s last movement and in Strauss’ sumptuous ones. The conductor offered his own combination of treats from Strauss’ great human comedy, and it was a refreshingly well-designed medley. I still cherish the wish that someone would create a Rosenkavalier suite that dared to end with the same delicacy of feeling as the opera. But there’s no denying the efficacy of Schwarz’s rollicking conclusion in sending an audience home invigorated and happy.

 

Bernard Jacobson