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Sunday, March 31, 2002

By David DeAngelo

If you've read any music journalism in the past 25 years, you've probably run across the debate about new music. With the towering giants of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and others casting long shadows, contemporary music has well-documented problems being accepted into the concert repertoire.

The roots of this issue go deeper, with one question cropping up even in the '40s and '50s: What should be the proper place of new music in the orchestral repertoire?

On the one hand, large segments of the audience want to hear music they know. On the other, by definition, every established piece was once new and unknown.

When the Pittsburgh Orchestra gave the Pittsburgh premiere of Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World," in late November 1897, the work itself was only four years old. Dvorak was still alive, and few Americans had yet to ruminate on the work's "folk-song" qualities. In every sense of the word the symphony was new music.

Since then, the piece has gone on to be one of the most beloved (and, perhaps, to some, overplayed) "classics" of the modern orchestral repertoire.

And along with the ubiquitous Mozart symphonies and Wagner Overtures, the orchestra, then playing at the Carnegie in Oakland, also performed some less well-known works. However, while these may have been cordially or even warmly received by the audience then, their presence on the current musical scene isn't felt at all. How many times do we hear the Pittsburgh Symphony play Victor Herbert?

By the middle of the century, the Pittsburgh Symphony (no longer Pittsburgh Orchestra), was well established, having reorganized in the late 1920s. But the riddle of new music was still in vexing audiences and critics alike.

In January 1946, the PSO, under the direction of Fritz Reiner, gave its first performance of a relatively new work, Bela Bartok's "Concerto for Orchestra." In the program notes, this problem of how to evaluate new works emerges: "[We are] too close to his work in time and space to evaluate Bartok's accomplishments with that objective detachment of which history alone will be capable." Not that this stopped the program writer from warning that Bartok's work "disdains the popular and that which easily pleases." The warning continues with this line: "The music is austere and logical."

Damning with faint praise indeed.

Ralph Lewando, in the review of that concert published in The Pittsburgh Press, shows some ambivalence toward the piece. He calls it a "difficult modern work" and "the music of the future." It is "music you may not get at first hearing," although it is the "work of a master who has taken the folk songs of his native Hungary and woven them into a symphonic fabric of superb quality and power."

Donald Steinfirst, reviewer for the Post-Gazette, had a much harsher view. The Concerto for Orchestra, he says, "has five movements, all of them too long." His musical aesthetics lesson continues with this: "It seems incredible that a musician of such perception as Bartok did not realize that a work at once so effective and so musical could not be made more so by some judicious excision." The first movement had "much needless brass" with "no little confusion," and the last movement "seems overblown."

By the way, that concert had, according to Steinfirst, the largest audience of the season, owing perhaps to the presence of Fritz Kreisler performing the Mendelssohn violin concerto.

Two months earlier, the Pittsburgh Symphony played for the first time Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring." The work must have been something of a mystery to the local critics.

Lewando said, "The novelty of the program was the Copland work." There is little else in the review to point us in the direction of what Lewando actually believed. He ends his commentary with this near unintelligible sentence: "The Orchestra bestowed their heartfelt endeavors to give this work a thoroughly musical presentation."

Steinfirst also had a problem with "Appalachian Spring." He says the only fault with "the wholly entrancing" music was its length. He admits there is some fine thematic material, but says Copland, by expanding the orchestration from a chamber to an orchestral setting, has stretched it to a "tenuous line."

So what are we to make of the premiere reviews? Given the vast array of new music then and now, some works will be played again (and again and again) and some will not. It's difficult -- if not impossible -- to tell on first hearing which will stand the test of time.

Dave DeAngelo is a free-lance writer who writes about classical music for the Post-Gazette.

Sunday, March 31, 2002