Soul of Genius

It only took one e-mail exchange with Adam Stern, the music director of the Seattle Philharmonic, for me to realize I screwed up.

For at least one week, and maybe longer, I had been referring to the first concert of the Phil’s season as “The Soul of a Genius.”  Not entirely wrong, especially since the substance of the concert was Wolfgang Mozart’s Linz Symphony and Pytor Tchaikovsky’s Third Suite for Orchestra.  Few would openly challenge the genius of these two composers.  But, it also wasn’t entirely right either.

As Stern said in an e-mail, the title for the concert came from a quote by Mozart, “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

Stern has a personal association with both Tchaikovsky’s suite and Mozart’s symphony.  “The concert is made up of music I got to know during my teenage years,” Stern says.  Tchaikovsky’s suite has been rattling around with Stern for almost forty years.

“I had wanted to do the Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3 since hearing it at a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert in about 1969 or so. It was the L.A. Philharmonic debut of Lawrence Foster, now an internationally-known and -respected conductor. So unique was the program that I still remember it nearly-forty years later.”

The Linz, as Stern mentions, is the conductor’s favorite Mozart symphony.  Pairing the symphony with a Tchaikovsky suite is natural because as Stern says, “Mozart was Tchaikovsky’s favorite composer.”

In fact, Tchaikovsky is quoted as saying “If Beethoven is my musical Jehovah, then Mozart is my musical Christ.”

Of Tchaikovsky’s body of works, he is known mostly through a handful of symphonic pieces like Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, and his final three symphonies which are stamped with the composer’s trademark resignation and melancholy.  But, in the ten years between the Fourth and Fifth Symphony, Tchaikovsky flirted with music intended as a symphonies which ultimately ended up as four orchestral suites.

Listening only to the last three symphonies, a person could get the impression Tchaikovsky was a hopeless romantic and…well…hopeless.  There is despair.  His writing for wind instruments practically begs Tchaikovsky to leap off a bridge to his death in the Fourth.  The swaying, second subject traded among the winds in the opening movement of the Fourth Symphony is leap inducing.  The wind tinged despondency comes on the heels of a driving introduction and pressing fate theme blasted from the horns.

Listen to Third Suite and you are likely to get a much different impression of Tchaikovsky.  The music is unmistakably Tchaikovsky’s.  The melodies are there.  There are, of course, moments of melancholy.  The first and second movement are smokey dances Tchaikovsky bolsters with hypnotic writing for bassoon and the other winds.  The third movement is a bubbling tarantella.  With each movement, the Seattle Philharmonic demonstrated there is more to Tchaikovsky than melancholy.  The final movement is in theme and variation form - two of the suites end this way.  In the hands of a lesser composer, theme and variations can be boring. On some level, all classical music is built on announcing a subject, distorting said subject, and then repeating it.  Even so, a straight theme and variation structure can be tiresome. This, however, is Tchaikovsky.

With another orchestra, Tchaikovsky’s theme and variation finale could have felt like a forced march. Though the Phil’s strings were spotty early in the piece, they ended strong, hitting the varied moods - winsome, fluttering, brash, tender, triumphant -  of the finale The musicians were buoyed by Stern’s noticeable dedication to the piece and his vigorous, even athletic Mitropoulos-like podium pouncing.  Concertmaster Lauren Roth showed her finesse with a powerful solo in the final movement.

Mozart’s Linz was treated well by the orchestra too.  The performance was steady and not as punchy as the Tchaikovsky.  the real surprise of the night was Vaclav Nelhybel’s Three Intradas for Brass.  Nelhybel wrote over 600 pieces, 200 which have yet to be published.  Nelhybel borrows from the intrada tradition of the 15th and 16th Century and blends it with a 20th Century rhythmic palette.

There was genius and love on the Meany Hall stage Sunday.  Mozart dashed his symphony off in four days and Tchaikovsky created an orchestral suite as affecting as his more famous and more popular symphonies and overtures.  Mozart’s symphony came out of a rocky marriage and journey to the Linz palace.  Tchaikovsky’s suite filled the musical void between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and after the composer’s marriage to a woman collapsed.  Both composers were unquestionable geniuses.  The source of their genius, at least in part, must have come from “love, love, love.”