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When Arnold Schoenberg conducted the premiere of “Pelleas und Melisande,” his symphonic poem based on the somber fairy-tale that inspired Debussy’s opera, in 1905, it was in front of a hostile Viennese audience. Reviews were “unusually violent,” the composer would later recall, with one critic suggesting he be committed to an asylum and banned from all access to music paper.
On Thursday the New York Philharmonic under the assured direction of Matthias Pintscher performed the work in commemoration of the composer’s 150th birthday. This time, it was followed by enthusiastic ovations. With luscious strings, swirling melodies and an effusion of chromatic yearning, this early work by Schoenberg contains little to offend contemporary ears. Even so, I noticed pockets of empty seats around me at David Geffen Hall, abandoned by their occupants after the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto performed in the first half of the program. For a core of the classical audience, Schoenberg is associated only with the atonal style he developed soon after “Pelleas” — a departure from the harmonic logic that underpinned Western music for centuries and that continues to bewilder many listeners today.
It is telling that the Philharmonic’s main anniversary tribute to Schoenberg is a late-Romantic work that bears no resemblance to the music that made him famous. (On Wednesday, a concert presented jointly with Juilliard featured his Suite, Op. 29, an angular jaunt based on a 12-tone series; in May, a series of concerts will include another early work, the luxuriant “Notturno.”) The truth is that while Schoenberg’s atonal pieces now garner near-universal respect for their technical originality, they seem no more loved than when first written. Still, it’s worth turning the spotlight on “Pelleas” because amid all the churning leitmotifs and Mahlerian climaxes the aesthetic tensions of the time are uncomfortably apparent.
Symbolist writers like Maurice Maeterlinck, the playwright who wrote the “Pelleas” source material, dissolved the narrative constraints of language to heighten the associative charge of individual words, much like abstraction in painting unleashed the power of color. (For an example of Schoenberg’s own Fauvist painting, look up his a blue-faced self-portrait from 1910 backlit in dusky pink.)
The melodic materials of “Pelleas” still feel representational, in that there are recognizable themes that depict the characters from Maeterlinck’s doomed love triangle. But in the hyperchromatic harmonies through which they are filtered, the material is relentlessly altered and alienated as motifs come into being and morph into something else. Over time, the musical imagery blurs and what takes center stage is the process of transformation itself. The art, even this early in Schoenberg’s career, is in the algorithm. And while the music of “Pelleas” still has a tonal center, the constant chromatic churn creates a feeling of harmonic ambivalence that is a short step from indifference to a home key of any kind.
The Philharmonic played with richly hued sound and brought dramatic urgency to the work’s Expressionist outbursts. In the love scene that functions as the symphonic poem’s slow movement Pintscher might have created more space for sensuous indulgence, but overall the cool-headed elegance of his conducting brought welcome clarity and balance to a score teeming with complexity.
The program opened with a composition by Pintscher, “Neharot,” the Hebrew word for rivers or tears. The 25-minute work, dominated by shuddering bass clusters and metallic resonance fumes, was written in the spring of 2020 and is intended, in the composer’s words, as “a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish” for the victims of the coronavirus pandemic. Rhapsodic and claustrophobic, the work aptly conveys a time of muffled grief and social fragmentation with wind players conjuring voiceless stutters from their instruments that sometimes evoked the ghost of speech.
Pintscher, who recently became the music director of the Kansas City Symphony, first picked up the baton as a teenager in his native Germany, and his compositions convey a conductor’s obsession with shaping sound. In “Neharot,” the drama of the orchestration stems as much from what is withheld as from the combination of instruments playing at any given time. A solitary trumpet evoking the Jewish mourner’s prayer desolately rang out amid pitchless sighs and choked flutters from the woodwinds. Both “Neharot” and “Pelleas” begin without violins, so when they finally take the spotlight — effusively in Schoenberg, with high-throttle anxiety in Pintscher — there is a sense of hard-won release.
Difficulty of any kind appeared to be banished in Mendelssohn’s radiant violin concerto with the charismatic Gil Shaham as soloist. Few pieces are as easy to love, and though the technical demands it makes on a violinist are formidable — especially when dispatched at the kind of speed that Shaham can muster — its virtuosity never feels like a struggle with physical limits but more like an exuberant celebration of what a violin does best.
At the beginning of the first movement, Shaham’s affable manner felt almost too collaborative for such a showpiece, and in the Andante his sound in soft passages came across as more distant than intimate. But in the final breakneck Allegro the sheer delight written into the music was palpable, a joy all the more infectious for being so enviably free of doubt.
New York Philharmonic
Through Oct. 13 at David Geffen Hall; nyphil.org.
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