JAMES JOYCE AND FRIENDS

I finally got around to attending a performance at Carnegie Hall.  I was sorry I missed the opening concert which featured the interesting pairing, to say the least, of conductor Nicholas Harnoncourt with pianist Lang Lang.  However, I greatly anticipated hearing the American Symphony Orchestra perform three very rarely heard works, all having connections with the writer James Joyce. 

The first piece on the program, Ballet mecanique by American maverick composer George Antheil, got the evening off to a rousing start. The unique orchestration (four pianos, two xylophones, glockenspiel, timpani, electric bells,synthesized airplane propellers!, and other percussion instruments) makes performances of this work extremely rare, although it is interesting to note that the work received its premiere in Carnegie Hall.  In determining which was better, the piece or the performance, one must conclude that for all of these musicians to maintain great ensemble and at least some attention to balance (although  it was often every person for themselves!) was really an accomplishment.   Obviously taking pages from Stravinsky and Les Six, the work is highly entertaining aurally and visually but very short on substance.

Entertainment was definitely not the goal of the next work, the 142-minute (I mean 42-minute) song cycle Lebendig begraben ("Buried Alive") by Swiss composer Othhmar Schoek.  He was successful at making the audience feel buried alive and either figuratively scrambling to escape or just give up and die. The program notes promised more than the piece delivered.  Another listen or two might reveal more but I am not sure I want to be buried alive again.

Ironically, the program notes for the final piece on the concert, Ulysses by the Hungarian composer Matyas Seiber,  made it sound deadly dull and it was anything but!  (The NY Times critic and I disagreed on this point.) With a text drawn from the "Ithaca" section of James Joyce's Ulysses, where Bloom (Ulysses) and Stephen (Telemachus) go out into Bloom's garden to contemplate "the heaventree of stars." It is always daunting for a composer to set great literature to music. Some writers detest the idea and some encourage it.  James Joyce, himself a fine singer, loved music and often thought in terms of music. Seiber obviously lavished great care in his setting. Although the choral writing was possibly the most interesting and creative (as well it should have been given the fact that much of the work was choral), the parts he chose to set as a tenor solo (Joyce was, I believe, a tenor) were equally effective and very well delivered by the soloist. The orchestra had plenty to do and the performers all seemed totally involved and in love with the music. This was a work I could easily listen to again with delight and pleasure.

One might wonder what Joyce had to do with the other two pieces on the program as the first lacks a text and for the second, the text is by  a German writer. Joyce apparently did not appreciate much of the modernist approach to composition but did like the efforts of George Antheil.  There was apparently some thought given as to a collaboration between Joyce and Antheil on an opera but almost nothing developed of this idea.

Joyce heard the cycle by Schoek and was so taken with it that he wanted to meet the composer, which he did. He even translated one of the poems from the cycle into English. He obviously heard something I do not.

It is great to have an orchestra dedicated to performing worthy but neglected music.  One might not share

enthusiasm for all choices made but that is just fine.