Roger gave me a lift to Rosslyn (no dinner again tonight), and I made my way to the Kennedy Centre for an NSO concert. This concert is part of a two-week festival of music with American connections. Tonight's concert, "Giants in America", was by noted composers who immigrated to the US: Stravinsky, Weill, Schoenberg. The first half was dull, but the second half made up for it.
The concert opened with Stravinsky's arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner. According to the program notes, this arrangement was considered "unpatrotic", and the Boston police even confiscated the sheet music, but listening to it now it doesn't sound that strange. About the oddest thing about it was that, in the middle of the primary melody that rises up ("Over hills and bright stars", or whatever the lyric is), in this arrangement the melody drops down, and it sounds like the notes are inverted so that they descend instead of rising. Perhaps this is what the Boston authorities objected to so strongly.
- A Survivor from Warsaw, by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg seems the wrong person to be writing a wrenching piece
about the war. Sure, his chaotic bursts of sound can capture violence, but that's the only emotion this piece could portray; the rest was just a jangle.
- Piano Concerto No. 4, by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
There are some Rachmaninoff pieces I really like, such as the Sonata for Cello and Piano, and I don't mind the #2 and #3 piano concertos, but for some reason #4, tonight, just bored me to tears. It was remarkable; after about a minute it had lost my interest as quickly as any Mozart piece does, and never regained it.
- Three Patriotic Songs, arranged by Kurt Weill. They were
originally written for a WWII-era recording, and then slipped into obscurity. In his spoken introduction, Leonard Slatkin said that they seemingly haven't been played since then, and tonight's performance was likely their first playing in 50 years. It's surprising that Stravinsky's arrangement was considered controversial and these weren't, because frankly Weill's arrangement is much stranger. In Stravinsky's version the melody is still quite recognizable, though it takes a few twists and turns along the way, but in Weill's you only get occasional fragments of the familiar tune. The orchestration is pretty standard for Weill, heavy on the brass and woodwinds.
- Greeting Prelude, by Igor Stravinsky. The oddest
possible arrangement of "Happy Birthday", I think; for example, it starts out with two loud drumbeats and a blare from the brass section. This minute-long piece was originally written as an 80th-birthday present for some conductor friend of Stravinsky's, though only the ghost of the familiar melody is detectable.
- Circus Polka, by Stravinsky. Written for the
Ringling Brothers Circus, to accompany a choreographed display by their elephants. The music is suitably jangling and underscored by ponderous notes from the tuba.
- Ebony Concerto, a final Stravinsky piece, with Loren
Kitt as the clarinet soloist. Another lively jazz-influenced piece.