by Professor Martin Gaskell
This weekend Santa Cruz Symphony, under Daniel Stewart, the Cabrillo Symphonic Chorus under Dr. Carlin Truong, and a stellar quartet of vocal soloists treated local audiences to stunning performances of what Frederick Stock, famous conductor of the Chicago Symphony, called “the greatest of all symphonies,” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. It is a work ranked by musicians and critics alike as one of the, if not the, greatest musical creations of all time.
The weekend’s sold-out concerts capped a highly successful season of Santa Cruz Symphony Classical Series concerts. One sign of this season’s popularity was that there were no season program books handed out at this weekend’s concerts. They had run out with the previous month’s Amadeus performances!
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, like the similarly large-scale symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, always presents a programming problem: what else does one put on the program?
At the first performance in 1824 in a theater intermediate in size between the Civic Auditorium and the Mello Center (and probably with similar acoustics), Symphony No. 9 was preceded by Beethoven’s now rarely played “Consecration of the House” overture, and an hour’s worth of his Missa Solemnis. One 19th-century conductor solved the problem by performing the entire Symphony No. 9 twice in one concert!
Daniel Stewart took a more modest approach. The program began with Dvořák’s exuberant Carnival Overture. It matched the mood of the audience perfectly. At the end people were ecstatic.
In the calmer part of the overture there were some notable solos for the cor anglais (Meave Cox), Principal Flute Sarah Benton, Principal Clarinet Karen Sremac, and Kiri Murakami-Loehmann, who was filling in as Concertmaster at short notice. Maestro Stewart had them take solo bows at the end of the piece. Norman Peck’s varied tambourine technique was also interesting to watch and hear.
The next piece had been announced in advance in the season program book as a world premiere of local composer Jaron Lanier’s “Music for Piano and Orchestra,” but this had been changed to his Khaenoncerto for Khaen and Orchestra, which had been commission for the year 2000 celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the founding of the city of Wrocław in Poland. As well as being a composer, Lanier is a noted computer scientist, technologist, and futurist.
First though, there was a short, last-minute insertion into the program. The story of this addition was told by the composer. Audiences appreciate hearing living composers say a little about their music, and Jaron Lanier is a particularly delightful speaker. He explained that he is, unfortunately, very prone to losing scores of his compositions! The September 1984 issue of Scientific American featured his computer programming work and had a piece of his music on the its front cover. Lanier had lost score to the piece. However, he and Daniel Stewart realized during rehearsals before the weekend’s concerts that all they had to do was look at the 1984 Scientific American issue to recover the music!
Daniel Stewart had then quickly entered the music from the magazine cover into music-notation software, so that the strings were able to give us the world premiere of The Scientific American canon! (I do have to fault the orchestra though for not reading directly off the Scientific American cover!)
The scheduled piece by Lanier was his Khaenoncerto for Khaen and Orchestra. The khaen is the national instrument of Laos. This unusual instrument consists of many parallel bamboo resonator tubes looking a little like pan pipes sticking up into the air. The pipes are sounded with reeds on the side that are somewhat similar to those of a harmonica (mouth organ). “In case you’re wondering,” said Lanier on Saturday, “yes, I did lose the score to this piece too!” This produced peals of laughter. In the absence of a printed magazine cover in this case, Daniel Stewart had transcribed the piece from a recording of the performance in Poland.
The scheduled Khaenoncerto that followed began with a solo cadenza for Lanier on the khaen. Then the orchestra began a canon, starting with the violas alone, then adding the cellos (a very beautiful combination), and so on. At the climax, when everyone in the orchestra is playing, the (amplified) khaen enters. It blended well with the orchestra, and its rich harmonic spectrum added a bell-like sheen to the ensemble.
After the intermission, Maestro Stewart took the podium again. He waited until everyone was silent and then commenced the hushed, mysterious, primeval start to the first movement to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The performance was as good as any I have heard and had all of Stewart’s famous attention to detail.
The great climax of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 is the start of the recapitulation (the return to the opening motifs after the so-called “development section” in the middle). To me it conjures up the maelstrom at the heart of a collision between two galaxies. A special shout-out to the orchestra’s timpanist, John Weeks, is needed here because it is his dramatic, minute-long drum roll that makes this moment. The audience burst into applause at the end of the movement.
A scherzo, the symphony’s least popular movement, follows. This is Beethoven’s longest scherzo. Like most conductors, Stewart omitted the longer repeats. I think we often make the mistake of thinking of Beethoven as always being serious, but the symphonic movement he is associated with introducing is the scherzo. Scherzo is the Italian word for joke. One shouldn’t miss Beethoven’s humor. I was delighted to hear an audience member near me laugh at the end of the scherzo just before applause broke out. That meant the orchestra had successfully conveyed the humor.
After the noise and drum bashing of the scherzo, we get the tranquility of the lyrical, yearning, and meditative slow movement — a movement that a famous astronomer I knew requested to be played as he was dying. It consists of alternate variations on two themes: the first, a serene slow theme played by the first violins and clarinets, and the second, a more flowing theme beautifully played by the violas and second violins.
It is amazing music, especially since it was written by a man who could only hear it by attaching a metal rod to the soundboard of his piano and clenching the rod in his teeth! (This is called bone-conduction hearing.) The high point of the movement was Philip Browne’s playing of the challenging, wide-ranging fourth horn solo.
The finale starts with cacophony — what Wagner called “the horror chord.” To enhance the drama, Maestro Stewart attacked this without taking a break at the end of the slow movement. After only waiting a second or two and receiving an affirming nod from John Weeks, who needed to rapidly change the timpani tuning, Stewart called on the woodwinds, brass, and timpani to explode with the dissonant chord that starts the finale with a jolt. The cellos and basses follow with an extensive recitative where they review and reject the music of the previous movements.
After this introduction, Stewart inserted a very effective short pause before the cellos and basses start Beethoven’s most famous tune, best known in the English-speaking world as the hymn “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee.” Beethoven’s tune grows through one of the finest crescendos in all of music. The “horror chord” returns, but instead of the instrumental recitative we get a vocal recitative sung by local rising-star baritone Edward Tavalin, who did such an outstanding job as the commendatore from Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the orchestra’s Amadeus last month. Tavalin not only sang the recitative but also illustrated the text with hand gestures.
The chorus joined in to start singing Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” They alternated with the vocal quartet consisting of Tavalin joined by soprano Dani Zhang, mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson, and tenor Joshua Stewart (who sang in last year’s Mozart Requiem). This tutti section ends with a surprise, held, high, fortissimo modulation as Schiller’s text described angels standing before God.
The Cabrillo Chorus and especially director Carlin Truong deserve highest praise for how well they handled the very demanding choral parts that take singers to the tops of their ranges far too often for comfort. Notably, the sopranos did not “squawk” on their high A’s and B’s. There was no obnoxious vibrato sticking out. Good tone quality was maintained in fortissimos. Truong had prepared everything very well.
If I have to pick out just a couple of outstanding choral parts, I would first choose the entry where the full chorus first sings the tune to Schiller’s opening lines. Even though I was expecting it, the massive effect of all eighty voices coming in fortissimo gave me quite a jolt.
Secondly, I would choose the high held notes set to the text which is translated in the program as:
Brothers, above the starry canopy
There must dwell a loving Father
Seek Him above the starry canopy!
Above the stars He must dwell.
Singers maintained pitch well on these long, sustained notes at their ranges through dynamics varying from fortissimo to pianissimo.
A number of instrumental choices that enhanced the performance of the symphony are worth mentioning. First, trombonist Teddy Van Winkle switched to an alto trombone for the Beethoven Symphony No. 9. For the powerful trombone accompaniment to the male voices at the words “Be embraced, millions,” tenor trombone Kaitlin Lamber joined bass trombone Doug Thorley. One could not tell by ear that there were two trombones, but the doubling added power to the declamation. For the march-like section in the finale, contrabassoonist Kris King played the bottom B-flats, the lowest notes of any orchestral instrument, instead of the decidedly less impressive B-flats an octave higher indicated in some editions.
Finally, a couple of very small authentic details. For the “Turkish music” in the finale, the percussion section did not use their largest bass drum, but a smaller one more in keeping with practice in Beethoven’s day. Also, Norman Peck had small metal rings on his triangle. Having such rings jingling on a triangle goes back to medieval times and was a practice that continued beyond Beethoven’s day.
At the conclusion of both concerts, there was immediate shouting, thunderous clapping, and repeated whistling. Everyone who could stand was up on their feet. A long-time player in the orchestra remarked that it was the longest-lasting applause he could remember. Eventually, a few players began to pack their instruments, but the applause just went on and on.
Many people in the audience, the choir, and the orchestra said how moving the performance had been for them. What one regular audience member remarked to me was typical of what I heard. She said that experiencing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was “uplifting” and “something we need in these times.”
Martin Gaskell
Photos by Rebecca Barnes
