Eugene Symphony, Jan. 25: Schubert's "Great," Grieg's Piano Concerto

Guest Conductor Stuart Malina and Pianist Jon Kimura Parker featured at the Hult Center.

by Tom Strini

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Symphony No. 9 in C Major (“The Great”), D. 944 (1825-26)

Schubert poured all of his intensity and ambition into the Symphony No. 9.

Franz Schubert, 1825 watercolor by Wilhelm August Rieder.
Wikipedia Commons

His symphony answers Beethoven’s Ninth, which Schubert heard at the premiere, in 1824. He even quotes the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s work, although he slyly slips it in, apropos of nothing, in a quiet moment of the boisterous finale. Schubert, like Beethoven, wrote at epic length; the Ninth weighs in at about 55 minutes, which open with an extraordinarily long introduction. Those 55 minutes are dense – almost everyone plays almost all the time.

Schubert exceeded his own comfort zone and the comfort zone of the age. His great gift for melody, which made him perhaps the greatest writer of songs in the Western Classical tradition, is on only occasional display in this symphony. And he stretched the capabilities of contemporary orchestras in every way, especially in his relentless woodwind parts.

Even in the 1840s, when Felix Mendelssohn was traveling around Europe with score in hand attempting to perform the Ninth, orchestras in London and Paris flatly refused to play it. All of which helps to explain why the symphony went unpublished and unperformed during the composer’s lifetime. Schubert heard only a messy read-through by a student orchestra behind closed doors.

Stuart Malina, the guest conductor for the Eugene Symphony performance, said that “The Great” remains a challenge to perform.

“It’s like a toddler, whose feet are already moving before they hit the floor,” Malina said, in a recent phone interview. “You put him down, and he’s just off. It goes on without an obvious arc or shape, and with lyrical phrases that are not all that lyrical.”

Stuart Malina, music director of the Harrisburg (Penn.) Symphony
Carl Socolow photo

The conductor who takes it on faces two challenges, according to Malina: conducting and cheer leading.

“It’s exhausting to play,” he said. “It never lets up, especially in the finale. The orchestra must remain focused, hold that edge of concentration, and keep that propelling motor running strong. Without it, the piece dies.” Malina has decided not to take the optional repeat of the finale. That would be “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The density of the scoring poses another challenge for the conductor. He said that considerable rehearsal time would go to identifying and bringing out the most critical lines in the mix. “Schubert creates a wall of sound, that you must somehow make translucent,” he said.

In many of these initiatives, Schubert followed Beethoven’s lead. His obsession with Beethoven, who was 27 years his senior, is evident throughout, quite apart from the “Ode to Joy” quotation. The abrupt shifts among often tonally distant keys, violent swings in mood and dynamics, and the tendency to sit on repeated notes and chords for long stretches all indicate that Schubert was consciously measuring himself against Beethoven.

“But Schubert went a step or two beyond Beethoven,” Malina said. “He’ll pare down to a single note and milk it for all it’s worth.  If he wants to change keys, he’ll just jump there, with no regard for proper Classical chord progression. This is Classicism going into bold Romanticism.”

The Ninth represents the late period of Schubert’s short life, a period that began around 1822. In that year, Schubert suffered a debilitating syphilis attack, and his health never really recovered. He continued to write songs, including the epic, landmark Winterreise cycle. But he turned in large part to larger forms, more adventurous styles, more complex architectures, and deeper levels of profundity.

Schubert worked furiously right up until his death, at age 31, in 1828. In that span, he created the Ninth and The “Unfinished” Symphonies, the Piano Sonata in B-flat, four operas and three string quartets, among other works. Many of them went unpublished and unperformed, but Schubert remained undeterred.

He just kept composing, a focused artist intent on securing his place in music history before his last grain of sand slipped through the waist of life’s hourglass.

The present work, especially, demonstrates his driven awareness of music history and hunger for a place within it.With that “Ode to Joy” quotation (but not only that), Schubert plants his flag:

“You’ve heard Beethoven’s Ninth. Now hear mine.”

Historical sources: Tom Service’s “Symphony Guide: Schubert’s Ninth,” Manchester Guardian; Wikipedia articles on Schubert and on the Symphony No. 9.

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 16 (1868)

Conductor Stuart Malina suggested that Grieg and Schubert were both essentially short-form lyrical composers with long-form ambitions. But where Schubert diverged radically from his early path in the Symphony, Grieg placed his normal thing – gorgeous melody – in a larger landscape.

“Grieg never loses that miniaturist approach,” Malina said. “It’s beautiful melody after beautiful melody.”

Jon Kimura Parker, Tara McMullen Photo       

The concerto, though endowed with fair measures of grandeur and virtuosity, is exactly that, plus one more element: Norwegian soul. Grieg is to Norwegians what Verdi is to Italians, Dvorak to Czechs, and Sibelius to Finlanders: The national treasure composer.

Grieg often drew on Norwegian folk materials. In the concerto, for example, the pounding rhythm of the opening finale theme is a halling, a competitive solo folk dance originally for young men. The music, in speedy 6/8 or 2/4, is meant to propel them through show-off tricks. The best-known is the hallingkast: A girl holds a hat aloft on a stick; the boy tries to fly through the air and kick the hat off, in a sort of Norwegian kung-fu move. You can imagine the kick as the third movement zips by.

Jon Kimura Parker, the program's soloist, has a special affinity for this piece. It was the first concerto he played in public with a professional orchestra, his hometown Vancouver Symphony, at age 20. He’s also played it in Norway at the Bergen Festival, with the Oslo Philharmonic. (Honorary Norwegianhood is a perk of the gig.)

“The concerto has a quality that many would say evokes Norway,” Parker said, in an interview via email. “But how, exactly, can one truly picture a country in musical terms? There are a few specific moments – the halling in the last movement, for one. But for me, the essence of what makes this music Norwegian…”

The pianist interrupted his explanation to apologize for being a music theory geek: “Remember, here, that I am a Professor of Piano at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. I happen to love chord analysis.”

He went on to point out Grieg’s fondness for minor-major 11^th chords. That would be a stack of notes comprising, in the home key, A-C-E-G-B.

“These chords, which can be heard as interlocking fifths, just say ‘fjords’ to me,” Parker wrote. “Honestly, I have absolutely no reason why I would say that!”

Well, one might suggest that the uncanny, haunting resonance of this chord conjures images of vast spaces and long vistas, deep, cold waters and high cliffs that amplify the calls of birds and the lapping of waves.  And one might point out that the intervals in this very chord match the open strings of the Blinde-Rasmus-stillet tuning of the Hardanger fiddle, the overtone-rich and resonant Norwegian national instrument.

Grieg knew the instrument well. He had a cabin, where he composed, in the town of Hardanger. On his walks, he stopped to listen to the local fiddlers play. Their haunting, unusual harmonies fell upon an alert composer’s ear, and he put them to good use.

Historical sources: “In the footsteps of Edvard Grieg,” from the blog of the Hotel Ullensvag, Hardanger, Norway; the website of the Edvard Grieg Museum; Wikipedia entry on the Piano Concerto in A Minor; the Gramaphone Masterclass page on the concerto, with commentary by Stephen Kovacevich, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Richard Whitehouse; and Karin Løberg Code’s Guide to Tunings page at the Hardanger Fiddle Association of America website.

Concert Info
Where: Hult Center Silva Hall, 1 Eugene Center (7th & Willamette)
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, 2018
Tickets: $25 to $60 at the Hult Center Box Office, 541-682-5000, and online.

Who: Eugene Symphony, guest conductor Stuart Malina, guest pianist Jon Kimura Parker
What: Schubert's Symphony No. 9, Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor

Jon Kimura Parker Master Class
Parker will instruct three local advanced piano students in a session open to the public
When: 4 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 23
Where: Beall Hall, University of Oregon Campus, 961 E 18th Ave.