PERSPECTIVE — The Minneapolis ICE-related shooting of Renee Good happened on Jan. 7, the news erupted the next day, and the day after that the Minnesota Orchestra played a long-planned program at Orchestra Hall, part of its Nordic Soundscapes Festival,” that turned out to reflect the tragedy.
No political sides were apparent on the Minnesota Public Radio broadcast, but the go-for-broke performances of Sibelius’ Violin Concerto and Nielsen’s Symphony No. 1 re-connected the musical dots in these multi-faceted works in ways that gave them a singular presence. And this is in an art form where programs aren’t just planned a year or so prior but often include music written a century or so before. Those who were in the hall reportedly felt the electricity — and, no doubt, in specific ways that had been informed and shaded by lobby conversations walking in.
James Ehnes’ usual polished veneer in the Sibelius concerto had a strident sense of emergency. Gruff orchestral sonorities showed music director Thomas Søndergård far from the lyrical smoothness one is used to in Herbert von Karajan recordings. And with the performance heat turned up, Nielsen’s youthful Symphony No. 1 crossed the line between exuberance and hysteria amid the sequential accompanying figures in the strings.
The following week with Sibelius’ Symphony No. 1, lightning stuck again: The opening clarinet solo became a requiem unto itself. Søndergård, the 56-year old Danish conductor who is emerging to the front ranks of U.S. music directors, found such strong harmonic undertows — contrasting with the composer’s wide-screen themes on the surface — that one wondered if the symphony had rewritten itself. Actually, it was a matter of different choices drawn from what was already there.
This, in what is often called the capital of “Minnesota nice” (a term I haven’t heard much since before the 2020 death of George Floyd)? Any orchestra’s chameleon-like ability to take on the color of its surroundings can accommodate a community’s always-shifting, not-easily-catagorized emotions in a public, open-ended forum.
I experienced that first-hand in February 2003, when the Cleveland Orchestra and soprano Felicity Lott gave a highly charged account of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs at Carnegie Hall. Music director Franz Welser-Möst dedicated the performance to the seven astronauts who had died that morning in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; Lott brought unmistakable intensity to the elegiac words. “Great music has the power to go where words cannot,” wrote music critic Donald Rosenberg of the performance in Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer.
External events ambushing Richard Strauss are distinctly different from performers who filter their personal lives through great music. A number of artists — from conductor André Previn to mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade — have described that practice as a mistake, something that can leave listeners baffled. Jessye Norman once exclaimed, “The audience wouldn’t know what do with me!” When Kathleen Ferrier, then ill with cancer, understandably broke down at the end of Das Lied von der Erde, she apologized for what she considered a breech in professionalism.
Designated memorial concerts — a different, more respectable animal — naturally guide interpretive choices and encourage performing musicians to take liberties. A live-recorded 1937 George Gershwin memorial concert in Los Angeles had Otto Klemperer giving Gershwin’s Second Prelude the kind of gravity that perhaps only this visionary conductor could conceive of the occasion.
But in Leonard Bernstein’s famous 1963 televised Mahler Symphony No. 2 with the New York Philharmonic, days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, there was no sense of reaching for parallels between Mahler and the tragedy at hand. Bernstein was giving the clearest possible reading of Mahler’s monument to death and transfiguration. Yes, Bernstein tinkered with the Beethoven Ninth text in his 1989 telecast celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, changing “Freude” (Joy) to “Freiheit” (Freedom). But it wasn’t necessary. Beethoven conveyed all that was necessary on the brotherhood-of-man front. In Minneapolis, a more official Jan. 30 memorial for Renee Good and Alex Pretti had Fabian Gabel conducting the Minnesota Orchestra in the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 that said it all.
Any great music with layers (like Mahler) is a candidate for current-events re-purposing. Shostakovich symphonies after the post-Stalin-crackdown (Nos. 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, and 15) don’t necessarily mean what they say and thus are ripe for implications suggested by outside world events. Programmatic symphonies, in contrast, are likely to be more stationary in what they say. Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony, for example, won’t be re-purposed to illuminate climate change or to memorialize the deaths of famous mountain climbers. Music written as an ancillary element to something larger — Bizet’s sparkling incidental music to the play L’Arlésienne — isn’t meant to have second and third levels. But Offenbach’s great operetta satires have potential because they look deeper at the foibles of human nature.
Beware of urban legends that make muddy waters murkier. Bernstein’s JFK Mahler concert wasn’t seen for decades but was described to me as having the Philharmonic musicians in their shirt sleeves and performing without rehearsal. Sounds rather rag-tag. When the video was re-released, the Philharmonic was in proper concert clothes and as “on” as they’d ever been. The great emotional presence in Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1938 Berlin recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (Pathetique) is said to have been a covert protest against Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Makes sense with what we know about the conductor’s inner political beliefs, but the recording sessions took place Oct. 25 and 27, two weeks before that horrible event.
In the 1944 radio-broadcast recording of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 by Walter Gieseking, one can be reasonably sure that the background crackling wasn’t firecrackers but gunfire — and contributed to the urgently fast tempos. It wasn’t the end of the world but might’ve felt that way. Yet even this concrete artifact has its mythology. It is said that air-raid sirens are also in the background. I’ve never heard them. But are there any truly wrong answers in charting something as elusive as musical meaning?
