MAESTRO LEVINE of BSO AND ALBAN BERG

Last night I had the privilege to be taken to the Saturday evening performance at Symphony Hall in Boston. Clearly, much of the orchestra was given the night off due to the three works chosen. The first, Mozart's Symphony No. 29 in A, (though not one of his more inspiring compositions) featured the principal violinist (on the loaned to BSO Stradivarius) and his second violinist as well as good sized sections of violins, violas, cellos, etc. The second number, by Alban Berg, a pupil of Schoenberg, was Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with Thirteen Wind Instruments. This cleared the stage pretty much. The last number, Serenade No. 2 in A, Opus 16 by Brahms did not require too many more musicians back, leaving the players sitting in a rather sparse configuration and the music soporific.

While the Brahms was lovely, it lacked the emotionality of some of the rest of his works. Thus, preceded and followed by somewhat benign music, the Alban Berg was spectacular for the damage it did to eardrums for much of its entirety. Schoenberg, who seems to have not only wanted to write 'new sounds of music' but to throw out all pleasing-to-the-human ear theory built by civilization to date . From his biography, Schoenberg attempted to strengthen the structural powers of tonal music, but in the process began to create a musical armature that would replace tonality. This is expressed by another biographer, "The Second Quartet of Schoenberg is truly a turning point in Western Music. The first three movements are fully tonal, though they use extravagant means of extending tonality. In the final movement, "the concept of a tonal center as represented in the major-minor system is discarded, its rejection explicitly indicated by the absence of a key signature." (Perle 1980:4)": The lovely sounds of Nature and most music would seem to have tonality but Maestro Levine insists on forcing the unappreciative Boston audience to listen to this, perhaps mistakenly assuming they will begin to like it, rather than look for a different musical experience for which to pay huge ticket prices.

Berg’s Chamber concert for Piano and Violin with thirteen Wind Instruments, totally unrecognizable as music to my ears, began with Thema scherzoso con Variaszioni followed by an Adagio movement, and ending with Rondo ritmico con Introduzione. The Chamber Orchestra score called for piano, violin and thirteen wind instruments, namely flute, piccolo (doubling as second flute), oboe, English horn, e-flat Clarinet, Clarinet in A, Bass Clarintet, Bassoon, Contrabassoon, Trumpet, Two Horns and Trombone (tenor and bass).

Throughout, my mind was stuck on pitying the waste of instrumental talent of these two fine musicians soloing, at times, wildly. Occasionally the trombone, another wonderful BSO musician, came in with the few flatulent sounding accompaniments written into the score. Other brass and wind instruments added the dissonance of a terminally ill Greek chorus, while fingers on keyboard or violin flew wildly and would have been better in a silent movie where the skill, more than the sound, could have been appreciated.

After the performance, I spoke with several people who hated it. Only one man commented, “Well, it is complicated” seeming to imply “you wouldn’t understand it” which I readily confessed was true. Another commented wryly, "It is obviously an acquired taste!" We agreed we would both be unlikely to acquire that taste. Many in the audience walked out after the piece and did not return following intermission. If anyone took an exit poll, the results were not shared. As I read up more on Berg I realized that he had also written the opera Lulu. It was probably the first piece of music I had heard (somewhere in the 70s) that made me want to leave the theater, as I did last night had it been possible and less rude to others around me.