BEETHOVEN AND WEBERN---ON THE SAME PAGE!?    
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Dec. 11-18, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 44
            Beethoven was the master once again---with a little help from his friends, like Emanuel Ax.
            I went to a program to hear Webern and instead found myself blown away by Beethoven. The nimble-fingered Ax, the ultimate master of the deft touch, took on the great, understated  Fourth Piano Concerto and made it his own, with deft trills and a springy style of play, very much in the spirit of the pianos available in Beethoven’s day.
            He played the more difficult of the two available cadenzas (solo display segments) in the first movement, running nearly four minutes long. And in the famous Andante, where the piano does the “taming the monster” exercise vis-à-vis the orchestra, the whole contrast was highlighted by the San Francisco Symphony’s generally heavy approach, with stentorian statements trying to quash that interloper called the piano.
            Ax violated the score on the concerto’s opening chord, which he rolled in arpeggio fashion. But his subsequent play was so compelling, who was going to complain?
            There followed the Fifth Symphony---two unquestioned masterpieces receiving their world premieres the same memorable evening in 1808, when few could have had an inkling of the epic role of these two pieces over the coming centuries. The tone of the piece is established by the choice of timpani sticks---not the more mellow booming fluffy sticks, but the rather hard ones, which from the very first page establish a more aggressive, quasi-military tone. Write what you will about the first four notes, the most famous in all orchestral  music, and how those triplet patterns recur throughout the work. But please look too at the unprecedented role of the horns, the feathery woodwinds, and the transition from a stormy C minor key to a triumphant C major finale. And in the third movement come not only fugues, but also a melody over an unresolved pedal-point that must have set on edge  the Viennese audiences unaccustomed to such dissonance.
            With Vienna under a lengthy occupation by Napoleon’s troops, this musical suggestion of overcoming all adversity, even in the darkest days, with a triumphant close must have been gratifying indeed. Rally the resistance! All wrongs will be righted!
            Needless to say, the Beethoven Fifth also has much relevance in today’s unsettled environment, both here and abroad, affording a much-needed avenue of hope.
            In contrast to all these dramatics came a wispy little Symphony. Op. 21 (1928) of  Anton Webern, the master of aphoristic statements; it was the quiet before the Beethoven storm.  Subdued and detached, its sparse sequences of notes skip all over the San Francisco Symphony in seemingly random fashion, but it’s very structured in 12-tone rows, where all 12 tones of the chromatic scale are sounded before any repetition can take place. Webern put together his unique jigsaw puzzle in music, with canons, retrograde, and mirror images. It reminds you of the Picasso paintings where several views of a figure are overlaid, but all in just two dimensions.
            The Webern dissections are as admirable as fine diamonds---though you will never hear patrons lean over to their significant others and coo, “They’re playing our song.” Even today, it remains far too modern in sound for most orchestras to tackle.
            Michael Tilson Thomas led the program with obvious relish, annotating the Webern for good measure (without mentioning the composer’s tragic end: Going outside to smoke a cigarette despite the curfew in effect in 1945, he was shot by occupation troops in Austria).
            MTT conducted the work without a baton, in contrast to the Beethoven Fifth, where he used a baton but threw away the score. He had opened the all-Viennese program with dances by Schubert, including some heavy, plodding segments you might see at rustic village parties in Niederoesterreich.
        These San Francisco Symphony concerts, with Beethoven (2), Webern and Schubert,  continue through Dec. 12 at 8 p.m. For info: (415) 864-6000, or go  online. Broadcasts on KDFC-FM (102.1) at 8 p.m. on the second Tuesday following.

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2009
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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