Eavesdropping at the NY Philharmonic via the lobby Jumbotron again.
Beginning with the Tchaikovsky first piano concerto. (Not the Monty Python version.) The soloist attempting to outshine in the manner of the composer, starched collar and rumpled linen, staring fixedly at the keys, perhaps some of the scents of the incense of Valaam monastery still in his coat.
A concerto is fundamentally dualistic -- in Mozart, it is a contest of virtuosity, in Beethoven, a political argument between the one and the many. But Tchaikovsky surrounds his soloist with an orchestra already versed in the Romantic, marinated in years of the repertory of the Bolshoi or the Mariinski, even the third chair second violin is accorded deference in the restaurants.
When the soloist wanders off on a fugue or a fantasy, the orchestra waits, confident in its massed strength. The wanderer will return from his woodpath. Which, of course, only prompts the wanderer further and further up the lonely mountain trail.
Unlike the battle for virtuosity in Mozart, or the battle of Napoleonic brothers in Beethoven, the orchestra, in the hands of the playful one, is playful. Themes bounced back and forth, a quick crescendo in the manner of a lion's playful roar. We are safe inside the massed tones of the Romantic -- this is the enchanted snow-globe where the notes hover and drift above and between them. Inside this safety, the soloist is alternately brash and playfully cloying. The venerable orchestra of the old Russian theatre is a force he has known since childhood, an old alliance as familiar as his brandy-scented uncles at the candle-lit table, a clean place of warmth and camphor-scented dry air from the heating, against the slush and mud of the northern winter outside. He knows this faerie band of old, and, with the confidence of Meister Eckhart playing his puppet theatre, he leads them on.
And then, the massed forces of the orchestra fall silent, and the piano, slowly at first, and then with a quickening boldness, begins to fill the air of the filled theatre with sound. That same theatre of his childhood is now his own. He returns the gift.
Afterwards, an encore, irrepressible, he launches into a furious playing of Liszt, the Campanella. The low tones sounded with a soft touch, but the bright ring of the topmost ostinato ringing out like an alarm. A string breaks on the sounding board, and there is nervous laughter in the crowd. Like the moment in The Cherry Orchard when the unseen string snaps, there is at first a careless abandon, almost a liberation, the 19th c. equivalent of smashing the guitar on the stage so that it will never play a lesser show, but then a sort of rueful, almost apologetic grin as he fingers the steel thread. He has broken his toy again. But they will buy him another one.
After the interval, Shostakovich contra Stalin. The present politics offering perhaps a clear analogy, a populist leader with revanchist taste in the arts, high honors being doled out to the Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and country music stars. Against this, a cosmopolitanism, an obscurantism. It might win the hall, but one will have to go back to the apartment afterward, and the Bakelite telephone on the lace tablecloth on the small table by the door may ring.
The first theme of the first movement commanding, insistent, repeated tones of warlike urgency. But then the strings bring in a second theme, a wandering, indecisive random walk, like someone wandering through the snowy streets in confusion. The menace of the beginning returns, somehow less glorious now that we have a sense of a wandering soul trapped inside that world.
Brecht: "Will there be music inside the dark times? Yes, there will be music about the dark times."
And then the cacophanous blurring of the glorious noises, and a lone bassoon returns to the theme of the wandering soul. It is the anti-concerto -- the many are not there to hear the one, the one hopes to survive the terrors of the many. Another small cacophony, and an even lower reed takes up the cause of the wandering one, perhaps wandering deeper into the shadow. In his box, the President sighs in some frustration, waiting for the heroic theme from the horns, or perhaps a falling chandelier. The wandering theme now in the bass tuba, approaching nadir. A bright theme emerges in woodwinds, perhaps the hangers-on of the battle shouting playfully in the streets. The massed strings quietly echoing in pizzicato, like hundreds listening from behind quivering curtains in the city. And then the nervous, frantic theme from the violins, souls ennervated almost to the madness which we begin to hear in the echoes of the cellos and basses. Surreptitiously, the flutists slip earplugs in against the wall of sound that now rises from the back of the ensemble, the crashing mechanical shadow of the infantry arrived. Then, oddly, a precise and measured sonata-form of well-phrased music, but played with trepidation and fear. Life appearing to continue. Despite it all. The horns sound the fatal theme without melody, simply the repeated terrifying tones, until like Frankenstein's monster, they begin to fashion a primitive melody with the same force.
As if in answer to the Volgon melodies of the threatening horns, the concertmaster intones a low lament, no longer the breathing of the wanderer that we heard in the reeds, but the song of that which is within him. And then his breaths, and his journey continue, walking through the snowy city, searching, as high above, the composer takes his turn at the observation post, binoculars in hand,
The various sounds of the city emerge, in obscure, cosmopolitan fashion. The wanderer is multiplied into many, then dozens, then hundreds. Sirens sound, both near and far off. The traffic of the city returns, hard to discern from the rumbling of the tanks from the battle before. The well-formed sonata retuns, played with the same uncertain and nervous gait. The President, in his box, shoots a querulous look at a terrified aide. On the old stage, the orchestra plays out the theme like a madman convinced of the genius of his interpretation. The horns return with a theme that a dark soul might think heroic. And then, briefly, the breath of the lone wanderer reflected in the reeds.
Only the briefest hesitation, and then the next movement begins with the wanderer's breathing made melodic, merged with the song within him that we heard the concertmaster earlier intone. The battle-worn soul has found a small charm against the night. The heroic horns, now emerging fully formed from the brow of Minerva, seem to drown out all other song. But the strings, the many, not the crowd, but the populace, begin to sound, and then take up the tempo suggested by the wanderer's song. The dictator, restless in his box, begins to sense that there won't be enough time for things to turn back to victorious themes of past greatness and the praise of famous men. Stubbornly, like a broken metronome pushing forward through time, the strings persist, not with the charm of the single soul, but the faceless force of the crowd, then in open conflict with the horns, evocative of the condemnation of till Eulenspiegel or perhaps the incident at Kent State. The people advance, but not in the manner of being led by heroes and presidents, but like rising water, persistently filling the streets despite the tyrant's scourges. With encouraging whistles to each other in the flutes, the strings again asssy their well-formed melody with increased confidence. Every continuation without the heroic crash of the infantry intruding is a day won, a quiet victory of the spirit, a Sarajevo soul having survived the snipers and made it home to dinner.
It is a paean to the people, but not one the leaders of state socialism could ever have embraced. The people are an entity that existed before the journey to communism began, and they will survive the time, whatever the nature of the time. The one that is composed of all can never perish. The horns insistently return, perhaps from the west, from German lands. Orderly European civilization filing down the long rows at Bayreuth. Against it, in the motherland of the east, the meandering melodies of the people, nothing glorious, simply a random walk in the fading light. But human.
Line from a soviet movie, in response to the exaggerated German manners (of a double agent) at the table: "We Russians, we might live in sh-t, but we have the truth." And now the crescendo, which partakes mainly of the questionable virtues of the horns, a smile starting to stretch from the corner of the dictator's mouth, to the relief of his aides in the box. But then it peters out into an insistent darkness almost without melody.
Manet nobiscum, Domine quoniam advesperacit.