The MSO bares its roots

All three pieces to be performed Friday by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra at its “Concertos for Orchestra” have an intriguing theme in common: mortality.

The MSO will join guest conductor Asher Fisch as it plunges into the concept with Wagner’s Overture to “The Flying Dutchman,” Mozart’s Concerto in A Major for Clarinet, and its showcase performance, Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

The first performance was inspired by the harrowing trek Wagner made while fleeing to London from the debt he accumulated in Riga.

Wagner escaped the Prussian border with his wife Minna in 1939, boarding a ship called the “Thetis.” The journey was only supposed to last eight days, but was prolonged to three weeks due to storms and high seas. At one point Wagner’s ship was forced to take shelter in a Norwegian fjord.

It is clear Wagner borrowed from his own experiences: in his opera, a woman falls in love with a captain of a condemned ghost ship.

The story is set with a sea captain compelled by stormy weather to seek a port of refuge. In the climax of the opera, the daughter of the story’s main character throws herself into the sea. Similarly, Wagner’s wife suffered a miscarriage as a result of their journey.

Wagner’s overture will be followed by Mozart’s clarinet concerto, a piece that premiered just two months before the composer’s death in 1791. Todd Levy, principal clarinet for the MSO, will tackle the concerto as the performance’s soloist.

“It runs the gamut between a lot of happiness and a lot of strife and sadness in some of the slow movements,” Levy said. “That’s part of the reason why the piece is considered so great. It’s not a superficial work. There’s a lot of meaning through the whole work.”

The piece has three movements. Levy said people may recognize the second movement, an adagio, which was used prominently in the 1985 romantic film “Out of Africa” featuring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.

“Clarinetists don’t have a whole lot of repertoire,” Levy said. “The ones that we do have, like this one, I would say are definitely at the top of my list of favorites.”

Levy explained that the basset clarinet for which the piece was written only had five keys, compared to the clarinets played by today’s musicians, which have over 20.

“The instrument that he wrote it for was limited and he really pushed the boundaries for what could be expected for an instrument of that time period,” Levy said. “To me it’s always amazing that he head the piece in his head for an instrument that was not in existence at the time that he wrote it.”

“It’s one of the greatest works of the classical period and for the clarinet, by far the best concerto written for that time,” Levy added.

The final performance, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, was also completed by its composer in the final stages of his life. The piece premiered in December of 1944, a little less than a year before Bartók died of leukemia.

The piece is a notable achievement in Bartók’s career, as it received high praise following its premiere. The five-movement work is not really a “concerto,” which would feature a solo instrument with orchestral accompaniment. No instrument is featured singularly in this piece; instead, as Bartók explained in the original program note, the work treats its many instruments in a “soloistic manner.”

Levy said this is why Concerto for Orchestra has become an early twentieth century staple to orchestral repertoire.

“It’s just so beautiful to listen to,” Levy said. “There are incredible harmonies and melodies. You really get to hear the different parts being featured—the winds and the brass. It’s really quite an incredible piece.”

The success of this piece is also noteworthy as Bartók, who was resigned to the hospital in 1943, said he believed he would never compose another work again.

This follows a trend found in the other two pieces. Wagner, Mozart and Bartók all confronted the inevitable concepts of death and fate while in the process of composition for their pieces.

It may be worthy for the audience to note, however, that a triumphant and lively melody can be found in all three works. They possess a similar string of hopefulness, expressing great artistic prowess that surpasses and even overcomes the power of death.

Concert Information
Concert time is 11:15 a.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4 and 5 at the Marcus Center’s Uihlein Hall. Tickets are $25-$82 at the MSO website, the MSO ticket line (414-291-7605) and at the Marcus box office, 414-273-7206.

Hear the MSO musicians and local music experts engage in a personal discussion about the symphony an hour before the performance at Meet the Music in the Anello Atrium at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts.