The third installment in the American Orchestra Series of concerts prepared for the Centennial Season of the San Francisco Symphony began last night with the first of two concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), conducted by their Music Director Ricardo Muti, in Davies Symphony Hall. The program offered three perspectives on modernism, each from a different century, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first, the last being a West Coast premiere. Needless to say, there were significant differences across those perspectives; but Muti conducted with a clarity of understanding through which we on audience side could appreciate the impact of each of the selections.
The first half of the program also had a structural integrity of its own. By coupling Arthur Honegger’s “Pacific 231” with “Alternative Energy,” the West Coast premiere on the program, which composer Mason Bates calls an “energy symphony,” Muti juxtaposed two impressions of the “machine age” separated by almost a century’s worth of thinking and rethinking about machines. This juxtaposition enhanced the agenda of Bates’ composition, whose perspectives on energy span a period of time from 1896 to 2222.
“Pacific 231” was the first of three compositions that Honneger called “symphonic movements.” He claimed that he wrote it as an exercise in building momentum; and the overall structure depicts an initial series of energy bursts to initiate movement, the acceleration of that movement, the “coasting” of a steady velocity, and then a gradual deceleration process culminating in a halt depicted by a single unison tone. Honegger denied that he had intended to depict a steam locomotive; but, after the movement was completed, he gave it the title by which it is now known, which specifies a particular steam locomotive model. “Pacific 231” was composed in 1923; and in 1949 Jean Mitry created a film consisting of locomotive images set to Honneger’s music.
While “raw energy” may have been the motivating force behind “Pacific 231,” Honneger’s counterpoint is highly evocative of the complex mechanics of a locomotive. We have individual ostinato “modules,” corresponding to the many different moving components; but we also have an elaborate system of linkages through which those components regulate each other’s movements. We are now used to energy that is easily provided and easily controlled. All we need to do is direct it through simple devices like an acceleration pedal, a brake, and a steering wheel. A Pacific 231 locomotive was not so easily controlled, and a train engineer had to understand all the details of energy creation and regulation before taking on the more practical task of “getting the train to go from here to there.”
It would therefore be far from demeaning to say that Muti conducted Honegger’s score with all of the “knowledge in action” intelligence expected of an experienced locomotive engineer. He provided the “driving energy” through which we on audience side could apprehend the imagery; but that source of energy was only the first stage. As a conductor he captured the essence of both the components and their linkages, of both the expenditure of energy and its regulation. The result was as thorough an appreciation of the meticulous detail in Honegger’s score as any of us could expect to encounter. This evocation of an all-but-forgotten perspective on energy served as an excellent introduction to Bates’ contemporary approach to the same basic subject matter.
As has already been mentioned, Bates takes a broader historical view that begins before the world of the Pacific 231 locomotive and extrapolates two centuries into the future. The opening music suggests the image of the sort of smithy that was necessary on every nineteenth-century farm as a reminder that, more often than not, “repair” meant “rebuild,” sometimes from scratch. The “junkyard” (Bates’ adjective) sounds from the percussion seem to suggest Henry Ford tinkering away in that smithy at the beginning of his quest for a self-propelled vehicle. A loud cranking sound suggests the automobile that would eventually emerge from his efforts, and that sound becomes a recurring motif in the remaining three movements. The scene then shifts to current high-energy research at Fermilab, just outside Chicago; and the percussion is now enhanced with “concrete” sounds of modern technology, cued from a laptop by Bates sitting behind the percussionists. This movement then extrapolates to China in 2112, which has become a wasteland in which the natural world has been reduced to a nostalgic dream. The final movement is a coda set in 2212 Reykjavik in which nature has reclaimed the world (and presumably is still providing geothermal energy); and Bates’ notes suggest that those few humans left on earth are once again on the brink of the quest for fire.
This is clearly an ambitious plan for a composition; and, if the resulting score lacked some of the intricacies encountered in Honegger, it was certainly rich in sonorities. This was particularly true where it involved Bates’ ear for blending his sampled sounds into the overall orchestral texture. Yet, at the same time, that metaphor of the locomotive engineer was as appropriate to Muti’s conducting as it had been in “Pacific 231.” Once again the burden of performance involved meticulous control of the expenditure of energy; and Muti’s control was always sure-handed. The result was a highly imaginative reading of a highly imaginative score, clearly establishing the CSO’s place as a 21st-century orchestra.
One might think that Muti’s selection of César Franck’s D minor symphony for the second half of his program would have made for an abrupt contrast with the first half. Yet Franck was regarded skeptically by many and embraced by an enthusiastic younger generation for his modernist thinking. The first performance of this symphony in 1889 left many perplexed, but today we are entirely comfortable with its harmonies, its rhetoric of phrasing, and an overall plan that unifies thematic material across its three movements.
Here again Muti conducted with a sensitivity to detail, often shaping phrases with micro-level shifts of the dynamic level or the underlying pulse. He was particularly good about holding back on passages in which the energy level begins to build. He conducted the symphony with a clear sense of where he wanted the major climaxes to be; and, each time one of those climaxes emerged, the result was an exhilarating experience. The result was an evening that concluded with the familiar sounds of the nineteenth century but that echoed with the adventures of modernism from beginning to end.
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