Last Sunday I decided to attend the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's performance of Johannes Brahms' Ein Deutches Requiem. This is not a review of the performance, exactly. It's more my impressions from the performance. The PSO has not asked me to do this, and in fact they might well be horrified if they knew I was writing this, but there you are.
Since I hadn't paid any attention at all to the promotional materials for the performance, I was surprised to find that the first half of the concert was the Dvorak Biblical Songs. (Note to the PSO Marketing Department, whose collective hearts have undoubtedly been broken by the preceding sentence, I had just been out of town for the previous month, and had a million things to catch up with. Under more ordinary circumstances I'm sure I would have seen the ads or the mailings or some such, but right now, not so much.) I found out about it because my son Edmund, who studies with Bill Cabellero, principal horn in the PSO, wanted to go. So we went. As I said, I didn't realize that they were doing the Dvorak (because I hadn't read the lovely program book either) until the chorus didn't appear, and I finally looked at my program to see what was going on.
I enjoyed the Dvorak quite a lot. I had never heard the songs with orchestra, only with piano or organ, and some of them I had never heard at all. Thomas Hampson is always a treat, both to see and hear, and so the first half was quite enjoyable.
But finally intermission was over, the assembled masses were in place, and the Brahms began. I was sitting next to my good friend Krista, who wanted to know why the brass, except for the horns (which I suppose were really counted more as winds in this piece) were on a separate set of orchestra risers, well away from the rest of the players. We speculated that perhaps they were being punished for bad behavior, or that Honeck had actually wanted them offstage but this was the compromise the Union negotiated. I was unable to enlighten her, however, because I had no idea myself.
But by this point I expect you're hoping I'll cut to the chase, and I will. How did I like it? Well, I'm not entirely sure. As a musical experience I loved it. It was absolutely ravishing. But as a performance of the Requiem, it was very different than any I have ever heard or participated in, and that's quite a few, at this point.
The problem with going to a performance of something that you know very well from a technical standpoint is that it is difficult to just enjoy it. One has to fight constant thoughts of "But you shouldn't do it THAT way!" Conducting a very well-known, frequently performed, and much loved piece like the Brahms s a bit like being the offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers—there are at least 63,000 people in the stands on game day that think that they could call the plays better than the actual offensive coordinator does. But I digress.
From the standpoint of a pure performance, I would say that this was by far the most "orchestra-centric" version of this piece that I have ever heard. I'm accustomed to the chorus being the focus in big choral/orchestral works, and this performance didn't feel like that at all. The chorus seemed like another section of the orchestra, and was part of the texture much of the time. Mind you, it was beautiful that way. One of the things that really impressed me about the performance was how much I heard in the score that I had never heard before. Inner lines, interesting woodwind licks, beautiful subsidiary melodies—you could hear everything, because Honeck went for a gorgeous transparent texture that I really loved.
You could hear and understand the words, just about, generally speaking. (I really appreciated the supertitles, though, despite how well I know it.) But the chorus was very seldom the dominant element in the performance. As a choral director, it would be really hard for me to conduct a performance of the work that way, but as an audience member it was absolutely fascinating to hear it like that.
I could of course quibble with little things that I would do differently. One example of that is something that I almost hesitate to address, because Honeck is the expert in ländler, but I thought that the fourth movement was a trifle speedy. You get the idea. On a superficial level, there are things that I would change. But on sort of a macro-level, it was a revelation as to how the piece could be performed, one that I never would have thought of.
All of which is to say that I clearly don't get out enough. Sometimes it takes just getting out of the house and into the concert hall to give one a fresh perspective on a well-loved work.
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