It often takes a while for the music to set in

Friday, July 25, 2008

By Richard Anderson

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-It’s not easy being a 20th-century composer.

Mendelssohn and Schumann lived and wrote during a time when it was all the rage in Europe to explore one’s inner wild-child, to plumb one’s relationship with nature, to exalt the power of the elements and the majesty and mystery of the continent’s geography.

But something very different was expected of composers of the “modern” age. Starting in the early 1900s, a pleasant musical walk in the mountains just didn’t cut it any more, and came to be dismissed, even derided, by the intelligentsia as backward, naïve, pandering. If art didn’t address the issues and the times – mechanization, Marx, modern warfare – why bother?

Anyway, these were the thoughts that distracted me around the middle of Saturday’s concert at the Grand Teton Music Festival’s Walk Festival Hall, led by guest conductor Steven Sloane (pitch hitting for Roy Goodman, who had to cancel at the last minute) and guest violinist James Ehnes. While the very first measures of Mendelssohn’s “The Hebrides” Overture hit me like a strong gust of fresh sea air, and Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, unnecessarily subtitled “Spring,” vividly brought the eponymous season to mind – as if one could listen  and not think of bunnies and chicks and leafy sprouts and other fertile things – it took a while for Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto to win me over.

At first, I held Mr. Sloane responsible for my initial lukewarm reaction. But it can’t be easy to zip in, take control of a 100-piece band, and hammer out a coherent, communicative interpretation of a major 20th-century work.

Then I turned my criticism to Mr. Ehnes, the 32-year-old Canadian darling who, despite a Grammy and his homeland’s Juno award for his recording of Barber’s 1939 concerto, seemed a bit reticent and too soft-spoken. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, or maybe it’s just Mr. Ehnes. In any event, I eventually came to appreciate his lack of pretense and bombast.

Ultimately, I had to suspect Barber himself, who, writing in Switzerland on the brink of a world-changing global conflict the likes of which no one had ever witnessed or could ever have imagined, naturally must have assimilated some of the tension and ambivalence of the climate in Europe. And ultimately, while the first movement, thoroughly lyrical and full of melody, failed to actually move, the work developed into an exciting and retrospectively poignant expression of creativity in the face of a world about to go utterly insane.

Was it Sloane finally making a connection with the Festival Orchestra? Was it Ehnes finding his groove (or catching his breath at 6,300 feet above sea level)? Or was it Barber, hitting his stride in the aptly titled (Presto in moto perpetuo) third movement?

I don’t know. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: I’m always glad to be challenged with a new piece of music, to be introduced to a work that fills in another bit of the vast open space of my musical experience. Besides, there is a fourth possibility for my inability to engage: me. Sometimes it just takes a while to shake off the day and the week.

Sometimes it takes several blows of the hammer to break down the wall. Sometimes the sublime goes over a guy’s head. And sometimes it takes more than one listening to fully appreciate a piece of music. I mean, I didn’t recognize “Schumann’s 1st” until that final thrilling fourth movement.

Whatever the case, by the end of the evening I had sloughed off the day and the week, my wall had been breeched, my head was far above in the whisps of the nighttime clouds.
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It often takes a while for the music to set in | Planet JH News Article: General News

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