scott weiss

Scott Weiss

University of South Carolina Symphony; Koger Center, Columbia; April 24, 2018

Every young orchestral musician knows that their orchestra (in this case, the University of South Carolina Symphony) has reached a benchmark in its development when it tackles its first symphony by Gustav Mahler. His works are only technically challenging, but also emotionally complex and at times psychologically mysterious. Over a century ago, Mahler’s name was a catch phrase for exorbitance or over-exuberance. Music critic Tom Service asked in The Guardian on the 150th anniversary of Mahler’s birth, “How did Mahler go from being a byword for excess to the composer every orchestra wants to perform?”

Perhaps Service answered his own question later in the story when he used words like “static,” “violent,” “tragic,” and “sentimental” to describe the composer's creations. Is it possible for young people in the prime of their lives (say, university students) to grapple with work that expresses such deep feelings about life and death in such fearful, at times, almost unbearably emotional music?

Apparently it is. The young USC musicians gave a marvelous performance of Symphony No. 1, called the Titan. They played their hearts and their souls out under the clear and thoughtful direction of conductor Scott Weiss. They were well-balanced, very well in tune, delicate at the right times and almost overpowering at those other right times. Woodwind and brass solos were superb. Percussion was muscular, and the string section was unusually rich and sultry.

To grasp the level of early misunderstanding of Maher’s symphonies, consider that the influential Austrian critic Robert Hirshfield called them “dangerous.” “Our epoch reveals itself as playful, doll-like and powerless in Mahler’s symphonies,” he wrote, “with their cowbells … chimes, wooden clapper … clownish [off-stage players], etc.” By 1910, Mahler, while working on his last symphony, the unfinished 10th, was further devastated when he learned of his wife’s affair with the young architect Walter Gropius.

Weiss did not misunderstand Mahler’s first. His interpretation was very faithful to the score, thus honest to Mahler’s, at least as much as we can understand them, given the mixed and changing directions the composer gave over the years. At first he called the piece a “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts,” “From the Days of Youth. Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces” and “Commedia umana (Human Comedy),” a funeral march based on ”Frere Jacques” introduced by a solo string bass, and finally “Dall ‘inferno al Paradiso (From Hell to Heaven),” the sudden outbreak of a profoundly wounded heart. The subtitle Titan may refer to mythology or the composer’s own idea of a Titan hero battling Fate. By the final draft all this programmatic material was dropped, but Titan remained on the score.

It truly is a titan among symphonies and the performance was — dare one say titanic? Massive, immense, intense, but occasionally heartbreaking. In other words, just right. This experience was arguably just what the university musicians needed to help prepare for later auditions and inspired performances in their future careers. And it made for an emotional, pleased audience.

Carl Nielson also composed massive and intense symphonies, but this concert began with quite a different musical offering from the Danish composer, his Clarinet Concerto. This piece’s birth and gestation is a neat story of a woodwind quintet from Copenhagen that Nielson heard and admired. It was 1921, and the composer and musicians bonded into a mutual admiration society, and Nielson wrote a woodwind quintet. The finale of the quintet comprises a theme and variations musically depicting the personalities of each player. Not satisfied with that, Nielson set about composing a concerto for each of the five instrumentalists, highlighting each player’s individuality and personality. Only two actually materialized, including the Clarinet Concerto,

The soloist on Tuesday was USC clarinet professor Joseph Eller, a player unafraid of very challenging literature and creative ideas. And this piece offers both. It’s in four sections united in one movement with an internal conflict between the keys of E and F and a stubborn snare drum that seems to call the clarinet to join in the musical battle of key centers. It’s all quite interesting, though probably requiring more than one hearing to grasp the subtleties.

According to the newspaper Politiken, the original soloist, Aage Oxenvad “liberated the soul of the clarinet, not only the wild animal aspect but also its special brand of ruthless poetry. Oxenvad’s sonority is in tune with the trolls and the giants.”

Eller’s performance was spectacular, though I can’t verify if his sonority was “in tune with the trolls.” Knowing how superbly this man plays, my guess is that it was.

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