Conductor Philip Chizhevsky about new music

This season, the Russian National Youth Symphony Orchestra (RNMSO) celebrates its fifth anniversary; tomorrow at the Concert Hall. P.I. Tchaikovsky (KZCH) his personal subscription is ending. In addition to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 7, an unusual composition will be performed – Concerto for string quartet and orchestra, written by Arnold Schoenberg, one of the creators of 20th-century music, based on the Concerto grosso op. 6 No. 7 by George Frideric Handel. The program is presented by the conductor Philip Chizhevsky, the one who told Ilya Ovchinnikov about the relationship of new music with Baroque music and whether a “All Schoenberg” subscription is possible.

— Among Mahler’s symphonies, the Seventh is one of the most difficult to perform. Is RNMSO playing it for the first time?

— Yes, and Mahler’s version for orchestra is definitely the most difficult. For me, the Seventh stands apart from his other symphonies – not only due to the uniqueness of the harmonic and orchestral solutions, but also due to the complexity of its formation. The design itself is striking, its amazing geometry, where the giants, the first and fifth movements, are located on the sides, closer to the center are two “Night Music” (parts two and four), and in the middle is a scherzo, which gradually falls apart, as if on a slow-motion film . The score has been on my desk for a long time; I was hoping to perform it even before the pandemic, but the time has only come now.

Each Mahler symphony is a new universe, a new position of the composer in relation to everything in the world, and the Seventh especially. What is its “inconvenience” worth from the point of view of shaping the finale: at each stage there is an accumulation of emotions, an outburst is needed, but the next episode begins, you are waiting for some kind of resolution, but another one sounds, followed by another. And at the end there is another deception: this whole structure is unexpectedly completed by a single C major chord. You might think that this is a catch and that there will be something else next, but no. The tonal plan of the symphony is also radical – from B minor to C major. However, there is plenty of radicalism in Schoenberg’s work.

— Why is it so radical for you?

— Because it uses the many possibilities of strings, almost all conceivable difficulties of ensemble playing are encountered. On the one hand, a quartet and a large orchestra are a striking contrast. On the other hand, the quartet is integrated inside the string group, for which it serves as a magnifying glass. At the same time, he solves the most difficult ensemble problems precisely as a quartet and, moreover, plays a leading role: a tribute to ensemble music-making of the Baroque times, if we recall the relationship between solo and tutti in the Concerto grosso of the 18th century. This concert is not very well known and will be performed in Moscow for the first time in several decades.

— How can you evaluate Schoenberg’s contribution to this work?

— Of course, Schoenberg put all of himself into it; there are primarily melodies from Handel, but in general mostly Schoenberg, and this should be played as music of the 20th century. Whether references to the practice of performing Baroque music are needed here is a matter of taste, but Schoenberg’s dynamic structure itself fully corresponds to our concepts of historically informed performance, no matter how funny it may sound. Yes, this is not a chamber orchestra, although not quite a symphony: two horns and trumpets, trombone, percussion, piano, harp, strings, woodwinds. But from the point of view of dynamics, articulation, strokes, it is quite authentic.

— Would such an experiment make sense: first perform the original—Handel’s Concerto grosso, and then Schoenberg’s “free arrangement”?

“I thought about this when we were preparing Sciarrino—shouldn’t we perform Gesualdo first—and when we played counterpoint XIX from Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” orchestrated by Luciano Berio—shouldn’t we play the original first. I believe that they should be performed separately, not placed next to the original sources – this is already different music. Comparing them is more a subject for a lecture or discussion.

— How much will a listener unfamiliar with his work learn about Schoenberg from this work?

— About Schoenberg in its pure form, especially about Schoenberg of the predecaphonic period, no. Although it is interesting that the Concerto for Quartet and Orchestra was created precisely at this stage of Schoenberg’s work and is completely different from his works of those years. When Handel’s arrangement suddenly appears next to them, it seems as if Schoenberg didn’t even make it – the style is rather Italian. It’s all the more surprising how skillfully he handled Handel’s opus: he emphasized its merits and showed himself in the highest degree of elegance and irony, so that one can only enjoy every note of the author.

His orchestral writing looks absolutely modern – this is not the Schoenberg of the time of Pierrot Lunaire, whom we can admire from a distance, but a late one, already in his declining years, who said that many more interesting things can be done in C major. The way Schoenberg uses the harp and piano, the drums – every note of the snare drum, tambourine, timpani or triangle is not accidental, a continuous feast of colors. Let’s remember Webern, whose entire work fits on three CDs: he wrote a total of several hours of music, his opus can last a minute and a half, but every note is the most important event. Likewise, Schoenberg manages to contain the inconceivable in these twenty minutes: he conveys all the richness of each note separately, doing this in a reading of baroque music.

— This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Schoenberg, a figure comparable to Stravinsky, but the Moscow Philharmonic’s subscription “All Stravinsky” is in its second year of success, while the “All Schoenberg” cycle would have been doomed to box office failure.

— To dedicate a subscription to Schoenberg and make it popular is an impossible situation, it seems to me. Stravinsky’s music also largely came “from the head,” and he himself said that it expresses nothing but itself, but Schoenberg’s creative legacy is also very uneven. I think everyone will find at least one composition to their liking; to play them all is a utopian task, which is of considerable interest, but museum-quality. We regularly perform “Peace on Earth” – a beautiful romantic composition, as well as “Enlightened Night”; We are also thinking about his other choral works. As for larger ones, I’m not sure, although at one time I was very interested in the mono-opera “Waiting.” I think that the opera “Moses and Aaron” and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra will be performed – I think it is tragic and even reminiscent of Brahms. And the Violin Concerto is incredibly difficult, it must be rehearsed literally beat by beat, then put together bit by bit, and it is not a fact that the result will make an impression on stage.

— I wonder why today the public is more ready to listen to, relatively speaking, the more radical Alexei Sysoev than to Schoenberg?

– This is due to time – let’s say, they also want to listen to Denisova and Gubaidulina less than before. Schoenberg is probably not radical enough for today’s listeners either. As for Sysoev, he is attractive for his inflexibility, I would say, the brutality of his composer’s thought. But working with a living author can be difficult in terms of developing nuances, which I am extremely greedy for; Sometimes you have to eat seven pounds of salt together to reach an agreement. The fact that we are now forced to stew in our own juice imposes an even greater burden on us.Ogreater responsibility than if Western authors and performers came to us and we could exchange experiences. Therefore, we must be even more mobile, sharper, more precise, more demanding of ourselves and communicate as closely as possible with living composers, learning from each other.

“And yet it is significant that the works of Schoenberg and Mahler, figures so closely related, will be performed in the same program.

— Of course, Mahler and Schoenberg have a lot in common. In particular, at the first concert of the “Society for Closed Musical Performances” founded by Schoenberg on December 29, 1918, a transcription of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony for piano four hands was performed; Arnold Schoenberg and Eduard Steuermann were behind the instrument, that is, Schoenberg played this music with his own hands! The orchestra is performing the symphony for the first time, and so am I: one can only envy the musicians who are touching it for the first time, not to mention the listeners. Especially if you imagine a visitor to the Philharmonic who came to a concert for the first time in his life.