My third experience with the 30-year-old Lexington Symphony came in Saturday’s ambitious concert in recognition of the Chinese American Association of Lexington, under the rubric of “Celebrating Coexistence.” It also represented an East-meets-West musical event, replete with native Chinese, Mongolian, American, and Russian composers reaching across cultural boundaries. The Lexington Symphony, a fully paid ensemble of old and young professional and semi-professional musicians, gives six concerts each season, including pops, ably directed by Jonathan McPhee, and serving the Lexington community in the moderated-size Carey Hall; its acoustics for orchestral sound, are quite decent. I heard a good anniversary performance of Beethoven’s Ninth here two years ago.
China Dreams: II. Fanfare, by Bright Sheng (b. 1955), five minutes long and explosive, led off the program and was compared by Jonathan McPhee to a collision of Chinese sound with New York City — maybe even Times Square. The composer, a refugee from Shanghai and the Cultural Revolution, made his way to New York and studied at Columbia and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein. In this isolated movement, part of a suite, one heard loud and bright layers of orchestral color, with trombone glissandi and fluttered brass, abundant percussion including temple blocks, contrasting with softer raindrop-like textures in string harmonics with pizzicati and clear notes on the glockenspiel before a return of the rowdy fanfare. There was a long melody in parallel perfect fourths, which is actually a cliché in Chinese-American movie scores. It would be interesting to hear the entire work sometime; it was commissioned by Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony, notable for its service to new music.
Colin McPhee (1900-1964, no relation) composed Tabuh-tabuhan, a Toccata in three movements for orchestra with two pianos, his best-known work. This was the first time I have ever heard it in live performance. It shows influence of McPhee’s study of Balinese music, including gamelans, and he was one of the first Americans to study music of that part of Asia as an ethnomusicologist. The first movement (Ostinatos) makes use of mechanically-organized layers of small repeated patterns, with plenty of tuned wooden percussion —xylophone, bamboo, temple blocks — combined with the pianos, and the finale brings some of this flowing, undulating texture back, after a middle movement, Nocturne, in which a solo flute predominates with haunting sound. But what caught my attention most throughout was the polytonal harmonic ambience, with rich sonorities and prominent bass support. Even the ending harmony was startling — a dominant seventh with the seventh in the bass, nicely suspended as though in mid-air. McPhee found this harmonic kinship in 1920s and 1930s Parisian and American music, and probably not in Bali. I thought of Roger Sessions’s score for Andreyev’s The Black Maskers (1928) in the same connection. Tabuh-tabuhan is 90 years old this year and it is good to hear it resurrected by a group that could play it expertly.
The evening’s real surprise came just before the intermission: a Concerto No. 2 for Morin-Khuur, advertised as the national instrument of Mongolia. It is a two-string trapezoidal box with fingerboard, larger than an er-hu, smaller than a balalaika, and it is played with a bow. (I am certain I had seen it on YouTube a few years ago, on a very moving program in which a small group of musicians played lullabies to soothe a reluctant Bactrian camel, coaxing her into suckling a solitary calf whose mother had died.) This concerto’s composer, Anger Erdentsogt, was not present but the instrumental master, Erdenbuhe, appeared in full kimono-like costume and golden boots, and demonstrated flamboyant skill. The music was heavily minor-mode pentatonic but tonally successful, especially in the beautifully expressive second movement, which also included an elegant trio of solo instruments, with cello and flute. There was a busy cadenza with open G-string (violin range) that sounded well through amplification. There were also a couple of moments of senza misura pizzicati, with all the strings plucking individually as fast as possible, which might represent a central Asian string technique as it does in some of Alan Hovhaness’s orchestral music. The style of the concerto as a whole was heavily Russian-Soviet cinematic from the 1950s, with ponderous low-register brass. The audience loved the performance, and rose to its feet to greet an encore, a traditional “Song of Ten Thousand Horses” of galloping ostinato, in which Erdenbuhe was assisted by his wife playing a second instrument.
Petrushka, in Stravinsky’s 1947 revised orchestration calls for a smaller orchestra than that of the 1911 Diaghilev ballet original. (Stravinsky always regarded the 1947 version as “much more skillful,” but many enthusiasts of the 1911 version have disagreed with this estimate ever since, even though fully respecting his ability to collect performance royalties as he could not before.) It was especially poignant to hear how the perfectly organized tumult of orchestral sound, especially in the first and fourth tableaux, influenced so much later music, certainly including all the other works on the evening’s program — a true meeting of East and West. I will say once more that Petrushka, more than The Rite of Spring, represents Stravinsky’s boldest and farthest-reaching leap into the musical unknown, fully comparable to Beethoven’s Eroica in its forward-reaching audacity; nothing like it had existed in music before. And as descriptive music, permeated with Russian folksong, it correlates perfectly with its scenario, a story ballet like no other, especially in its poignant final moments.
The performance was full of enthusiasm and boldness, despite some splatter here and there. The high parts for the horn section are sometimes deadly difficult, and we remember that in the original 1911 performances Paris possessed many of the best wind players anywhere in the world and grappled with unheard-of technical problems. But everybody in the ensemble handled Petrushka with obvious and complete comprehension, notwithstanding some of the compositional aspects that remain puzzling even today. (“I don’t know many things more valuable than the section you call ‘Tour de passe-passe’ [Magic Trick, Tableau I],” Debussy wrote to Stravinsky). And no orchestral work in the standard repertory is more difficult to organize and to execute. Even the famous trumpets of the Vienna Philharmonic couldn’t handle it for years. To see and hear this group, bravely controlled by an expert Jonathan McPhee, was a reassurance and a real pleasure.