They can’t all be winners.
Orchestras, chamber groups, soloists or opera companies take a risk when they pay a composer to write a new work for them. In the best possible scenario, a masterpiece is born and the commissioning body gets the prestige of helping bring it into the world.
That rarely happens. Usually the commissioned piece gets performed once or twice, then gathers dust in the library while other premieres come and go.
On Saturday, Rafael Payare conducted the San Diego Symphony in the first United States performance of “Time” by the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher. “Time” was co-commissioned by the San Diego Symphony, along with orchestras from four other countries, including the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, where Payare is also music director.
It was given its first performance in September in Montreal, with Payare conducting. Saturday’s performance at The Rady Shell revealed a 20-minute-long work in three parts, performed without breaks. I’ve had the opportunity to hear the work several times (the world premiere is available on Medici TV), and it does not seem likely that “Time” will live much beyond its performances by the other commissioning ensembles.
“Time” began, appropriately enough, with percussive regular ticking, suggesting several wind-up clocks clacking away. The broad sweep of the piece was clear enough, the transitions almost always smooth, the orchestral writing handsome. Where it lost me was in a sudden stylistic change about two-thirds of the way through — from a fairly chromatic, often atonal harmonic vocabulary to mundanely tonal harmonies. The tonal language there suggested a first-year composition student’s pastiche of Mahler or Bruckner. That overly simplistic material wasn’t very interesting, and its relationship to what came before and after was unsatisfactory.
Composers have been shifting from atonality to tonality and back for over a hundred years. I can’t tell you why some can do it with ease, while others fall on their faces. Schnittke, Berio, Ives — they all had a gift for it. Anna Thorsvaldsdóttir convincingly moved from noise to gloomy modal harmonies in the San Diego Symphony’s performance of “Metacosmos” last month.
Why couldn’t “Time” make a similar stylistic shift? I can’t explain why, but I can report that it didn’t. They can’t all be winners.
The musicians appeared to play well, but even their best efforts couldn’t improve “Time.”
It’s forgivable that the symphony might gamble on a new work that didn’t deliver, but there’s no excuse for programming a histrionic mediocrity like Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 12 in D Minor, Op. 112. With the subtitle “The Year 1917,” this musical evocation of the Communist Revolution is a sequel to Symphony No. 11 and its program about the 1905 Russian revolution. In 2020 Payare and the San Diego Symphony made an outstanding case for a reconsideration of this neglected Shostakovich work, but Saturday’s performance of the 12th confirmed that there is not enough lipstick to put on that musical pig. How Shostakovich could produce such a hot mess after the power of his 11th Symphony and the bleak terror of the 13th is a question I leave to musicologists. I just hope I never have to hear it again.
Thank goodness for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19 and Emanuel Ax, who redeemed an otherwise uncharacteristically uneven concert with Payare and the symphony. Ax’s dependable musicality and effortless technique brought grace and humor to Beethoven, with excellent from Payare and the musicians. The rude, off-tune blasts of a boat horn that sounded somewhere between an F and a G-flat could not derail the poise and charm of their performance.
Hertzog is a freelance writer.
