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“Because of the acoustics of Woolsey Hall, we will be not sticking precisely to Schoenberg’s written notation and written rhythm of the words,” said William Boughton, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s conductor. “The entries and the endings are extremely important, but … what happens in between — it’s more important that the audience hear and understand the words.”
The attention to detail he and the orchestra brought to last Friday’s rehearsal for the NHSO’s upcoming concert on Thursday — of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw — was astonishing. It may be difficult at first to imagine the importance of a passage of 20 measures in a work like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — yes, the one that contains “Ode to Joy” in its final movement — which runs about 70 minutes in an average performance. But this is where the conductor is able to make his mark on a piece that has been performed countless times, bringing singular momentum, tension, and release to the passages leading up to the famous themes. It is also how an orchestra can make a work like Schoenberg’s bracingly atonal A Survivor from Warsaw — a fictionalized account of a concentration camp, featuring a narrator as soloist — connect with an audience, and show them the connections between two works that at first seem to have nothing in common.
In Friday night’s dress rehearsal, the maestro doubled as teacher, humming and using imagery to complement technical terms to get the sound he wanted out of the orchestra. Sometimes he asked groups of the orchestra to play passages alone to better address their performance. Afterward, hearing the same passage played by the full orchestra, he shouted in encouragement as the orchestra responded to his feedback.
Speaking over the phone about the program, Boughton highlighted one of the goals of the program.
“It’s the juxtaposition of the two works,” he said. “Man’s inhumanity to man in the Schoenberg, and the great possibilities and love of brotherhood in Beethoven and Schiller’s message in the Ninth Symphony — showing man’s capability in both extremes.”
Even in rehearsing the fourth movement of the Beethoven, there’s a complexity to those possibilities. The famous “Ode to Joy” melody appears in the basses and cellos about four minutes in from the start of the movement. The melody permutes and twists, recalling the stark, minor-key opening before the soloists and choir first appear. Boughton spoke to the orchestra about contrasting the terror of the opening and some of the lengthier instrumental passages with the more straightforward joy the choir and soloists express. If the text of the 24-minute movement is about joy and brotherhood, the music illustrates it with allusions to the awe and terror of the divine.
In a shorter work like A Survivor from Warsaw, the focus increases, dealing with just a few measures at a time. The balancing act is trickier, as Schoenberg’s music is more sonically dense than Beethoven’s. It may be easier to grab onto the rhythmic organization in Survivor, in the militaristic trumpet calls and snare drums.
But there are also some purely psychological expressions of terror, anxiety, and tension underscoring the words of the Speaker, a role taken on by actor Steven Routman. Schoenberg’s text is set in sprechstimme, a form of dramatic speech with rhythms and approximate pitches given, but the abovementioned technical challenges with the acoustics of Woolsey Hall have forced the actor and orchestra to make some compromises.
In Friday’s rehearsal, Routman handled the English and German passages with ease, conveying recollected trauma and capturing a sense of survivor’s guilt. As the work reaches its climax, a male choir, which has slowly formed a line in front of the stage during the course of the piece, begins singing a Hebrew prayer in unison along with the first trombone. The melody is hardly comforting, but it grounds the listener in contrast to the busy counterpoint of the rest of the orchestra.
“For me the Schoenberg is such an incredibly powerful work,” Boughton said. “When I listen to it, it almost brings me to tears.… I think it’s one of the most powerful eight minutes in music.”
Ultimately, the differences between the Beethoven and the Schoenberg — in era, style, and subject — can be viewed as expanding the idea of triumph, seeing it in resilience against oppression, or in the ecstasy of an imagined unity of humankind. Either way, Thursday’s program will invite audiences to expand their ideas of musical expression, and of the orchestra as a vehicle for it.
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra performs “Triumphant Voices: Beethoven’s Ninth” on Thursday, April 2nd at 7:30 PM, at Woolsey Hall in New Haven. The NHSO is joined by the Fairfield County Chorale, the Hartford Chorale, and Guilford High School Voices.
