November 15 & 16, 2024
Martin-Marietta Center for the Performing Arts
Raleigh, North Carolina – USA
North Carolina Symphony; Carlos Miguel Prieto, conductor; Stephen Hough, piano.
Sarah GIBSON: warp & weft
Ludwig van BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 37
Johannes BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1, Op. 73
Christopher Hill | 19 NOV 2024
Sarah Gibson, a Southern girl who took her doctorate at University of Southern California, wrote warp & weft for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which gave its premiere in January 2019. It seems to have become her most performed orchestral work, and it’s not hard to guess why. Like most recently written music I’ve encountered, it privileges texture and sonority over lyricism and narrative (except in broadest formal outline), and it samples recognizable snippets of music from earlier composers the way a lot of hip-hop samples older pop music. Ms. Gibson’s samples are attractive in both source and usage, her practice of developmental melodic variation is skillful, and her formal structure is simple and easy to follow.
Sarah Gibson, composer. June, 2022 (sarahgibson-music.com)
Ms. Gibson has written that warp & weft was inspired by the art of Canadian quiltmaker and feminist Miriam Shapiro. Using weaving as a metaphoric extension of standard music theory, Ms. Gibson took warp to be the “horizontal,” or melodic and rhythmic, parameters in her composition and weft to be its “vertical,” or harmonic, parameter. She is an accomplished orchestrator; her ensemble eschewed most brass instruments but employed a wide variety of percussion, including piano, castanets, wood blocks, sandpaper blocks, a vibraphone, tubular bells, and more. These provided textural depth to different planes of orchestral sound from the two horns, standard woodwinds, and full complement of strings.
At the opening one heard three- and four-note motives, which gradually morphed into five- and six-note motives and later into extended melodic phrases (none of them intentionally memorable), typically more like the musical equivalent of scrambled eggs (with chives and freshly ground pepper) than of poached eggs. (That’s a joke, folks.) The sampled sounds were Coplandish chord progressions reminiscent of Appalachian Spring. warp & weft closed with forty or fifty seconds of dynamic, periodic rhythms accompanied by major triads. When one uses major triads in a non-tonal context, as in warp & weft, it is always challenging to find an ending as satisfying as the kind tonality easily provides. William Schuman, for instance, wrote a great deal of inspired music that failed this particular trial. To the contrary, Ms. Gibson’s efforts at closure succeeded, in this reviewer’s opinion.
Sarah Gibson, wife and mother as well as composer, died of cancer in July 2024, in her 39th year. Rest in Peace, and may your well-wrought works continue to be heard.
Beethoven’s middle-period works are the ones that were most influential during the nineteenth century and the ones, as a stylistic period, most music lovers associate with the composer’s name today — symphonies like No. 3 (“Eroica”), No. 5 (“Fate”), and No. 6 (“Pastoral”); concertos like the one for violin and three for piano (Nos. 3, 4, and 5), and piano sonatas like the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata.” Of these paradigmatic works, Piano Concerto No. 3 is the earliest and, in some ways, the freshest.
Classical balance still frames the argument in the concerto’s first movement, but Beethoven has by now made it so thoroughly his own that this reviewer, for one, thinks only in passing of Mozart when hearing it. The slow movement springs from an inner stillness that makes the composer’s brasher music all the more powerful. When played with the appropriate dash and virtuosity, the last movement can be a romp, potentially the most devil-may-care finale among Beethoven’s concertos.
The composer and pianist Stephen Hough (pronounced “Huff”) first attracted notice in the 1990s through his recordings of unsung repertoire performed with uncompromisingly brilliant pianism and musical sensitivity. Mr. Hough has also been something of a polymath — that is, also a skilled writer whose online musings are uncommonly interesting. In 2001, Mr. Hough received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his advocacy, musicianship, and high intelligence. I believe he used it mainly to spend more time composing classical music. Before the grant, in the late 1990s, Mr. Hough recorded a Mendelssohn concerto cycle. After the grant, in the Aughts, he broke through the glass ceiling most British pianists deal with, recording more mainstream concerto repertory such as a Saint-Saens cycle (2001), a Rachmaninoff cycle (2004), a Tchaikovsky cycle (2010), and more recently a Beethoven cycle (2020).
Mr. Hough’s way with Beethoven is like no one else’s, yet it is in no way eccentric (as Horowitz could sometimes be). Rather, it is historically informed and deeply considered yet infused with a visceral character that extends our experience of what Beethoven could and can be. I mentioned Mr. Hough’s “brilliant pianism,” and here I want to add that his brilliance is not obtained at the expense of refinement. One hallmark of Mr. Hough’s technical prowess has been the extraordinary evenness of his touch. This remarkable evenness was evident at the start of his career over thirty years ago, and it remains evident in the liquid, even trills and classically sculpted passagework of his Beethoven in Raleigh. Other fine pianists might provide a similar aesthetic approach to the first movement, but no one I have heard has made so much of Beethoven’s first-movement cadenza. Hough played it with such dramatic urgency that it became the movement’s expressive apex and made the subsequent restrained codetta uncommonly satisfying.
I mentioned Mr. Hough’s musical sensitivity. Another hallmark of Mr. Hough’s playing over the years has been his ability to expose inner depths of pieces that others might play merely prettily. This sympathetic depth was evident at the start of his career over thirty years ago, and it found an ideal vehicle in the slow movement of Beethoven’s concerto. This was, without exaggeration, a performance for the ages, a performance one wished Beethoven himself could have attended.
Pianist Stephen Hough takes a bow, with Carlos Miguel Prieto and the North Carolina Symphony at Meymandi Hall in Raleigh. (courtesy of North Carolina Symphony)
I mentioned that Beethoven’s last movement can be a romp. Mr. Hough did not play it as such but rather made it more of apiece with the slow movement. That said, Mr. Hough brought out the (as it were) “Hungarian” element of the main tune more than I’ve heard before, which made it all the more memorable. Throughout the movement, the melodic importance of Beethoven’s left hand was likewise brought out to an extent that seemed wholly appropriate yet new to this reviewer. The last third of the movement was performed with especial clarity and conviction. In sum, every great pianist brings their unique approach to the recreation of masterpieces, and in Hough’s case, one could imagine a different but not a more authentic or compelling melding of composer and recreator sensibilities than was presented with the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto.
Finally, I used above the word “authentic.” Malcolm Bilson, for one, has shown how thrilling Beethoven can sound on a forte-piano. More recently, Michie Koyama has recorded late Beethoven sonatas on a (slightly later) period instrument. For many, however, Beethoven still sounds best on a modern piano, and Mr. Hough plays him on a modern piano. But not without cognizance of the instruments Beethoven himself knew. One of the pleasures of Mr. Hough’s performance was the way he used massed pedal effects of the kind Beethoven experimented with in the period he wrote Piano Concerto Three. Sviatoslav Richter was doing this in the “Tempest” sonata decades ago, but one has rarely encountered it since. Mr. Hough did it a lot and always to great effect.
Johannes Brahms, ca. 1853
Brahms, in his youth, wrote (between 1857 and 1859) a delightful, life-affirming, four-movement Symphony in D major. But because he modestly called the work a “serenade,” Opus 11 is seldom played (compared to the symphonies and overtures from his later years). Three years before this D-major work, however, Brahms began sketching a thornier C-minor work that he premiered about twenty-one years later as Symphony No. 1. Very likely the original impetus, as expressed in the introduction to the first movement, was Robert Schumann’s attempted suicide in 1854. Very likely, the long gestation was, in part, a search for authentic ways to move from the first movement’s tragedy into the last movement’s positive hymn of redemption. Based on the compelling and pithy musical argument found throughout this symphony, its long gestation must also have been a time of experimentation, of rejected and excised ideas, not one of prolix elaborations.
From its first performance, Symphony No. 1 was recognized by some as one of the supreme masterpieces of Western art music. Brahms knew its worth, but he also knew that in his time art music was heading in a different direction, so he was unsure, as he approached the end of his life, whether pieces like Symphony No. 1 would even be performed in the coming century. Confirming these suspicions, he also knew that, after having made his best effort at writing significant orchestral music, the local symphony orchestra in Vienna was uninterested in offering him a conducting position. As far as the powers-that-be in Vienna were concerned, Brahms could remain indefinitely as chorus director of the local Singakademie. This closed door to professional recognition finally opened in the mid-1890s, near the end of Brahms’s life, but by then it was too late. Brahms had cancer and demurred, saying that though being conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic had always been his dream it was no longer an option.
In October 2024, when Carlos Miguel Prieto and the North Carolina Symphony performed a concert that included Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, the maestro said that concert and the concert reviewed here were, in his mind, two parts of one larger concert. In retrospect, this was a hint of how he and the orchestra would interpret Brahms’s First Symphony. It has been this superannuated reviewer’s privilege to hear performances of Brahms by those who were alive at the same time as Brahms. One might guess that no performances could be more authentic than theirs, but in recent decades students of performance practice have identified multiple ways in which performances of Brahms in the early twentieth century differed from first performances. These differences certainly include changes in orchestral seating, where first and second violins, following Stokowski, are no longer seated antiphonally. They also concern the use of natural-valve versus keyed horns. But they especially include tempos, which (as always with performance tradition scholars) were seen to have been much brisker than were the tempos chosen in the early twentieth century by performers who had been living with Brahms’ music for a few decades.
Mr. Prieto and the North Carolina orchestra hewed to the twentieth-century manner of performing Brahms. Tempos were not slow but were moderate enough to permit each musical gesture to be savored on its own terms. As I’ve opined in previous reviews, Mr. Prieto is a master of obtaining transparent balances in his orchestra, and this allowed a great deal of Brahms’s compositional and instrumental subtleties to emerge throughout each movement. The sturm und drang of the first movement was rendered with genuine passion. But it was the second movement that anchored the symphony. It can be played as an intermezzo, but this time, as if inspired by the slow movement of the Beethoven that preceded it, it revealed “spiritual” secrets this reviewer has not heard revealed before, and at its end quite a few members of the sophisticated Raleigh audience applauded, as they should have, knowing full well that applause is ordinarily reserved for a symphony’s end, even in a very good performance. This was the second rapt performance of a deep slow movement in a single evening, and it was more than special. Performances of the third and fourth movements were merely excellent, and the audience gave the conductor and performers a well deserved standing ovation at the end.
Was it a perfect performance? Not in this reviewer’s opinion. To be perfect, in the outer movements the strings would have ended their phrases with more conviction, with slightly more sustained final notes. There were passages and phrases Mr. Prieto had obviously worked on, and in these great attention was given to phrase ends. But other phrases lacked the ultimate measure of conviction, and most of the time this was due not to their overall contour but to the way they ended, somewhat mechanically, as if one were performing, say, a war-horse. That said, there’s no denying that the North Carolina Symphony performed overall with a high level of engagement and inspiration, and the enthusiastic reception they received from the Raleigh audience was evidence enough of this. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- North Carolina Symphony: ncsymphony.org
- Carlos Miguel Prieto: carlosmiguelprieto.com
- Stephen Hough: stephenhough.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.
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