The Vienna Philharmonic’s annual visit to the United States—a decades-old tradition—is a highlight of the national musical calendar. After its initial stop at New York’s Carnegie Hall, where it gives three concerts, the self-governing ensemble proceeds to one or two other destinations. This year, the secondary destination was a new one: West Palm Beach, where the Vienna players performed two of their New York programs at the Raymond Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and amid the general urban decay that has afflicted America’s big cities, Florida (especially the well-to-do Palm Beach area) has become a rising arts capital, with audiences, arts philanthropy, and talent congregating in one marvelously warm place. It is only natural that orchestras from other parts of the world should travel here to perform. The Vienna Philharmonic was warmly welcomed with what looked like sold out audiences for each of the two programs it offered and was announced sold out in New York as well.
The Vienna Philharmonic has no permanent conductor. Its annual American tours are led by a rotating cast of the world’s greatest conductors chosen by the instrumentalists themselves, who make most decisions by simple majority vote. This year’s choice was the players’ fellow Austrian Franz Welser-Möst, longtime music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Welser-Möst will step down in 2027, and he approached the podium with some halting steps betraying mobility issues, but the inspired precision for which he is well known was firmly on display. The three programs were anchored by two grand symphonies. As it happened, both were ninth symphonies. Neither was Beethoven’s famous (and last) work of that number; rather they were those of Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, neither of whom lived to hear their own ninth symphonies performed. The pairing across programs was all the more poignant because Mahler was an often singular voice championing Bruckner among a chorus of naysayers.
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, which was immodestly dedicated to God, was left unfinished at his death. Its soaring architecture, like that of his other symphonies, has had its detractors, who claim that it builds elaborate harmonies that go nowhere and can therefore inflict a tedious listen. But their sheer scope has irrepressible appeal. Ill and near the end of his life, Bruckner worked on the symphony for nine years but never got to the end. When he died in 1896, he was putting the final touches on the work’s third movement. He had planned a fourth, of which he left only sketches. From the time of its first performance in 1903, conductors have extrapolated the finale from those sketches, but in an experiment in 1932, when both versions were performed in the same concert with a Munich audience asked to vote on which they preferred, Bruckner’s original, unfinished version was selected and is now regarded as definitive. This is sensible in an unintentional way, for the dying Bruckner fancied the third moment, a slow adagio, as a “farewell to life.” It is slow and yet, uncharacteristically for the composer, dissonant. It ends with a gesture suggesting consciousness and its release—as good a metaphor as any for death—with ascending brass and a final transcendence that truly does sound like the work’s natural conclusion.
Welser-Möst’s ease with the score could not have supplied a better guide to Bruckner’s vicissitudes, but lasting only about an hour, there was time for another selection. The paired work was Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6. Berg arrived in the generation after Bruckner and eventually became a leading exponent of the short-lived expressionist school, but these arrangements, which premiered before the First World War, sent European culture reeling in crisis and doubt, offer a welcome lyricism that he had not completely abandoned. A deep admirer of Mahler, who personified the late Romantic tradition, Berg rebelled against him while nevertheless paying homage. The first two pieces resound with prolonged motifs that vanish into nothingness as percussive rhythms take over. The second piece, labeled “Reigen” (“Round Dance”), moves on, however, mocking traditional waltz beats in a cruel extrapolation that foreshadows the strains civilization would soon suffer. The third piece, a march, returns some semblance of order, with tonality firmly in place as it builds to massive fanfares, simulated hammer blows, and final resolution. Once again, Welser-Möst led with insight and sensitivity.
At the West Palm Beach performance a week later, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony resounded in the hands of unremitting mastery. Its opening “Andante comodo” movement draws us slowly into a supple spiritual realm before yielding to a playful second movement dominated by distinctive Austrian folk music in the tradition of the Ländler ditties known to Mahler from his prolonged countryside respites—an environment where he had the freedom to compose. A scherzo third movement repeats earlier themes before the ethereal adagio fourth movement launches into some of the most sublime symphonic writing in the classical canon. With horns gently complementing a full use of the string section, it raises us to the heavens.
The second New York concert, which was not repeated in Palm Beach, offered a complex array of shorter pieces more in line with Carnegie Hall’s seasonal theme on the fall of Germany’s Weimar Republic. It opened with the music of Paul Hindemith, proscribed by the Nazis as “degenerate.” His Konzertmusik für Blasorchester, Op. 41, which premiered in 1926, is a send-up of military band music and makes an unsubtle mockery of the martial values that met such an inglorious end in the First World War. That mockery was suited to Weimar sensibilities, but, along with them, fell decidedly out of fashion a few years later and remains an outlier in a cultural universe still defined by sentimentality.
Such whimsy was decidedly absent from Richard Strauss’ deeply affecting “Symphonic Fantasy” from his first post-World War I opera, Die Frau ohne Schatten, which premiered in 1919. Arranged by the composer in 1946, the year after the next and far worse world war, it looks back to the tale of the poor dyer Barack, whose dissatisfied wife is tempted by a supernatural empress to sell her shadow—metaphorically her ability to bear children—but ultimately resists and commits herself to marital bliss. Distilling four hours of opera to a musical suite of just over twenty minutes must have been a challenge, but Strauss pulled it off and Welser-Möst delivered the opera’s lush and stirringly Romantic themes with panache and delicacy.
Proving that we still live in a fundamentally Romantic age, the audience received Strauss’s music more enthusiastically than Hindemith’s and certainly more than Arnold Schoenberg’s artistically rebellious Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31. Composed on the 12-tone scale, this series of vignettes has never found firm footing in the repertoire. Schoenberg and the avant-garde musical intelligentsia of the 1920s defended the theory behind his work as a bold break with the classical tradition, but even the composer himself admitted that “my music is not modern, it is merely played badly.” Far from ensuring what he promised would be “the dominance of German music for the next 100 years,” it instead became more like an afterthought, a rarely heard appendix in a book of weightier material. Some conductors have championed it, but its appearance here was unmemorable, however technically well executed.
Maurice Ravel’s familiar La valse, which premiered in 1920, was originally conceived as something greater than its 12 minutes suggest. The composer wanted to create a grand apotheosis to the Viennese waltz tradition which dominated European social dance before the First World War. The experience of that conflict, in which Vienna was the capital of an enemy country, and in which Ravel drove French military supply trucks, led him in the opposite direction, toward a grotesque parody of the waltz designed to suggest what he called a “fantastic and fatefully inescapable whirlpool.” Influenced by the moody stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which seek to distill one emotion for concentrated psychological effect, Ravel distorted the enemy music into a suggestion of horror, with hints of dreams, hallucinations, and a final sundering cataclysm of sound. He did such a good job, in fact, that the Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned the piece for his balletic performing company, ultimately refused to have it choreographed for fear that it would lose emotive power. This infuriated Ravel, who found other avenues for its dance accompaniment, but the work remains a landmark case of culture inflected by politics. The thought today is not unfamiliar.
