Schubert and Liszt
Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Opera House, August 21
★★★★½
Classical music has various notable, if presumably conjectural, representations of humans encountering God – a searing chord in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, overpowering exultation in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Bachian counterpoint in Schumann’s Paradise and the Peri.
In his Dante Symphony, however, the deeply religious Franz Liszt was persuaded by none other than Richard Wagner not to attempt this in portraying the third part, Paradiso, of Dante’s Divine Comedy. So after an anguished and conflicted first movement, Inferno, and a deeply meditative second, Purgatorio, he concludes the symphony simply with a yearning Magnificat for female voices.
Composer and Liszt scholar Humphrey Searle regretted this because it left the work unbalanced. However, Simone Young and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra demonstrated that Liszt’s solution, when carefully balanced and spaciously paced, can create an artistic statement of profundity, beauty and originality.
The SSO brass and winds gave the sequential iterations that build tension in the first movement impact and force, backed by string playing of incisive intensity. Young gave the second movement Brucknerian expansiveness, and when the voices of Cantillation entered from the back of the hall for the Magnificat, it was as though the air was filled with new radiance and transcendent calm.
In the first half, pianist Louis Lortie played the solo part of Liszt’s arrangement for piano and orchestra of Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy (originally for piano alone) with virtuosic brilliance, sophisticated poise and masterly musical judgment.
In the opening Allegro he varied the sound against the orchestra with discriminating subtly, bringing elegance and weight to the Adagio section in which Schubert recalls his own song, The Wanderer, which is the basis for the Fantasy’s thematic material. The Presto was rhythmically playful before Lortie led into the finale with a fugue of measured emphasis and force.
Australian composer James Ledger’s Two Memorials began with an effective evocation of the aphoristic expressionist style of Anton von Webern, capturing that composer’s remarkable economy of expressive gesture, before giving way to less compressed discursiveness.
The second memorial, to John Lennon, began with an undulating texture recalling Lennon’s Imagine. These two composers inhabited separate creative universes but a sudden bass drum stroke in the Coda reminded us what they shared – both were prematurely killed by gun violence.
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