Monday, October 23, 2006
LOCAL CLASSICAL MUSIC
As much as I love the Cleveland Orchestra, getting to Severence Hall to hear them has proven to be too big of a hassle. This year we decided to try the Akron Synphony Orchestra. Their concerts take place at E. J. Thomas Hall on the University of Akron campus, a short drive from home.
Last Saturday they played Brahms' Tragic Overture and soloist Axel Strauss played the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major. Excellent music.
The lesser known Akron Symphony is smaller than Cleveland and composed proportionally of more stringed instruments. There were 30 violins, and 7 bases. I didn't count the cellos. The brass section, by comparison, is much smaller.
E. J. Thomas Hall has an unusual layout. The seats arc around the stage in an unbroken line, and are accessible only from the extreme left or extreme right of the stage. Rows are tiered such that every seat is a good one, however from the Grand Tier up concert goers look down upon the orchestra. I haven't yet sat in the flying balcony. That's the nosebleed section.
On Saturday we were seated near the right in the Grand Tier. From our seats we were above the orchestra and looking slightly down. About half way through the concert I happened to notice that angle provided a different view of the 30 bows in the violin section located on the left of the stage. They seemed to take on a life of their own, rising and falling in synch in what almost appeared to be a Ballet of the Bows.
After intermission the program switched to Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. The conductor introduced the piece by telling of Bartok being confined to the hospital, dying of lukemia, when the conductor of the Boston Symphony requested he compose a piece for them. It was composing this piece that brought Bartok back to life. His reviving strength is apparent in the Concerto which begins on a very somber note and increases in strength and vivacity with each movement.
Something else was noteworthy, particularly in the last movement. The piece is disjointed, jarringly so for me. One could almost get the impression of a frantic search for meaning, running first to this and then to that, and finding none, so that the quest offered no possibility of conclusion. The intrusion of a busy world of sights and sounds and possibilities was overwhelming in its intensity and its meaninglessness. Something is grossly lacking in the picture it presents. What could have occupied Bartok so completely at the moment of composition. Was it fear? Fear of death, perhaps, and a headlong rush into life as one last escape... any life...every hint of life...for one last fling before the curtain fell?
I reflected on the words of the conductor as he opened the piece. Bartok, he told us, believed in his own personal trinity of science, nature and art. But did Bartok believe in the Trinity which could have saved him from this headlong rush into motion?
I looked him up online, and found him in the Unitarian-Universalist Association website. Bartok, living under the Russian umbrella, was not a believer. According to the website,
Bartok had been brought up as a Roman Catholic. The ethical legalism taught in the religion classes at school drove him away from his early faith. "By the time I had completed my 22nd year," he later wrote, "I was a new man--an atheist." In a letter written in 1905 Bartok claimed to be a follower of Nietzsche and expressed his skepticism about religious teachings: "It is odd that the Bible says, 'God created man,' whereas it is the other way around: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, 'The body is mortal, the soul is immortal.' whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory."
So it would seem that his Concerto for Orchestra grew out of his own personal philosophy, animated by the nearness of death. Was I hearing his doubts at this point in his life? Was I hearing a final search for transcendent meaning, a search that grew more frenetic as the end approached?
When the concert was over I left feeling vaguely sorry for this obviously brilliant composer whose worldview had apparently intruded to destroy what harmony he might have had in this worldly life, and what hope he could have had for the next. I would hope that when my life is near its end, I will not still be engaged in a frenetic search for meaning that I heard in Bartok's disjointed Concerto for Orchestra.
