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REVIEW: The BSO’s Pathways of Romanticism, Episode Two

Watching an orchestra play to an empty hall can be a bit depressing. Unless the piece happens to be Mendelssohn's String Symphony No. 10 in B minor, which is, shall we say, unsupportive of gloomy sentiment.

BOSTON — In the second episode of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s “Pathways of Romanticism” series, works by Mendelssohn, Weber, and Schumann tell the story of early 19th-century Romanticism. The program’s magazine feature provides biographical accounts of the composers and outlines the fascinating connection between Boston and Leipzig, which is to say, the connection between the BSO and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (of which BSO music director Andris Nelsons is Gewandhauskapellmeister.) This program will be spelling it all out for you through May 22 (link requires BSO login).

As it turns out, Leipzig is pretty much ground zero for the Romantic movement in Western music, championed and promulgated most famously there by Felix Mendelssohn and by Robert Schumann, who wrote: “We propose to attack the inartistic nature of the immediate past, which has nothing to offer by way of compensation except a great development of mechanical technique … We wish to prepare the way for a youthful, poetic future.” That’s what Romanticism was all about: restoring the poetry of art “to its place of honor.”

George Henschel
Portrait of George Henschel by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1879. Image courtesy Wikipedia

It’s easy to forget that the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in addition to being a band of 80-odd crack musicians, is a 140-year-old institution that during its early days played an active role in the Romantic movement. Its first conductor, the remarkable George Henschel, was a lifelong friend of Johannes Brahms; Tchaikovsky was in his prime when the BSO performed his first piano concerto; and Wagner, Liszt, and Dvořák were still on the scene long after the orchestra’s founding in 1881. It should be reasonable, then, to assert that when the BSO presents a program about Romanticism, it is telling a story about itself, recounting part of its own history.

Watching an orchestra play to an empty hall can be a bit depressing. Unless the piece happens to be Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No. 10 in B minor, which is, shall we say, unsupportive of gloomy sentiment. At the very end, the musicians hold their bows in the air (as string players do), and the silence is … golden. The last chord takes a full four seconds to fade completely into silence in the darkened hall.

Enjoy it while you can, because it could be a very long time before pandemic-inspired distanced seating comes back into vogue. In any case, don’t expect Mendelssohn’s String Symphony to sound this good the next time you hear it performed. Don’t expect all the presence of a quartet with the depth of tone you normally hear from a much larger ensemble. Expect it to sound more like someone forgot to rosin their bow.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Lead Recording Engineer Nick Squire. Photo courtesy Nick Squire

Here’s why: Symphony Hall happens to be one of the finest recording studios in the world. It’s the room where this orchestra goes to earn Grammy awards, including at least one for recording engineer Nick Squire. Andris Nelsons works with Squire on final mixes, but control over the balance is possible only because Squire has placed a lot of microphones onstage where they normally don’t go, inches from individual instruments. This provides the option, at mixdown, of raising a single instrument’s level for just the few seconds it’s on camera for a closeup. It works.

So in this and other of Squire’s recordings, we have a case where pandemic restrictions — distanced seating — have resulted in a quality of semi-live sound that you might have expected from a recording orchestra like the Academy of St Martin in the Fields but not from an orchestra like the BSO.

Besides judicious microphone placement, Squire got everything else right, including equalization and artifact-free compression. But perfect audio engineering is desirable only if the players are as good as … these players. Everything came together on String Symphony No. 10 in terms of both audio engineering and musicianship, and if you listen with headphones, you’ll be amazed by all the detail.

It’s been a good year for BSO woodwind players. Some of the best dressed musicians in the orchestra sit in a row behind the strings and play their hearts out in relative anonymity. (Their faces are known mainly to people sitting on Tanglewood’s lawn, where the big screens reveal all.) But in virtual concerts, BSO woodwind players are as visible as anyone else, and occasionally they take center stage.

BSO Principal Clarinetist William R. Hudgins. Photo courtesy BSO

In this program, BSO Principal Clarinetist William R. Hudgins takes the spotlight on Weber’s Concertino in E-flat for clarinet and orchestra, Opus 26. Seeing Mr. Hudgins in the middle of the stage, looking completely exposed in acoustically foreign territory, conjures images of the labors of Hercules. But in this story, the hero prevails unscathed. Hudgins and Weber give you all the virtuosic display of a clarinet concerto but in half the time.

If horn players of the BSO could play and grin at the same time, they would do so. They relish a challenge, and Robert Schumann’s Concert Piece for four horns and orchestra, Op. 86, is the kind of piece they live for. Schumann obviously knew horn players well and knew how to challenge and please them, because in this piece he has them doing everything they love to do when they want to show off for their moms. In this respect, the piece is almost like a concerto, because it says, “Here are all the things a horn can do beautifully.” (Of course, there’s poetry in it, too.)

Last on the program is William Grant Still’s “Suite for Violin and Piano,” performed by BSO first violinist Victor Romanul. I will discuss this performance in another article that will include an interview with Mr. Romanul.

 

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