To Begin and Continue: Adventure at the Miller Theater, With Melissa Smey (original) (raw)

Music Review | 'The Blue Rider' in Performance

Sept. 24, 2009

On Wednesday night Melissa Smey began her first full season as the director of the Miller Theater at Columbia University. It was clear from the kickoff program, “ ‘The Blue Rider’ in Performance,” a fascinating multimedia project presented in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, that the Miller Theater will be just as adventurous as it was under George Steel, Ms. Smey’s predecessor.

“The Blue Rider” was the name of a short-lived but epochal artistic movement, a collective of painters, composers and writers who essentially invented abstract modern art as it came to be known. The group, formed in 1911 in Munich, did not survive the outbreak of World War I. But associations were made that would change art forever, notably the friendship between the painter Wassily Kandinsky and the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

The performance at the Miller, conceived and directed by the accomplished pianist Sarah Rothenberg, presented works by Schoenberg, his students Berg and Webern, and other composers in a setting that allowed video images from Kandinsky’s paintings to be projected on screens behind the performers.

After intermission the Brentano String Quartet played Schoenberg’s seminal String Quartet No. 2 (1907-8), a gripping piece that shows the composer beginning to cut loose from tonal moorings, though he always disavowed the term atonality. During the first movement four dancers from Armitage Gone! Dance performed a piece by the choreographer Karole Armitage.

If Schoenberg had not been a composer, he might have become a painter. Painting was not just a hobby for him, but a serious pursuit. Kandinsky, a latecomer to painting, did not begin until he was 30 in 1896, when he settled in Munich and went to art school. But for him music offered a visceral model of the way art can affect us on a deep, psychological and indescribable level.

The Miller Theater project coincided with the extensive exhibition of Kandinsky’s works now at the Guggenheim. For me the truly thrilling works from that exhibition are the paintings that Kandinsky did in the few years before World War I, when he took a leap into a new realm of abstraction.

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The Blue Rider' in Performance Sarah Rothenberg with a projected Kandinsky at The Miller Theater.Credit...Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times

Much of the music that Ms. Rothenberg presented was familiar to me, especially the Schoenberg pieces. Yet I was excited to hear it, having just seen the Kandinsky show. By adding the video images from the paintings to the performances during the concert she exposed the live-wire connection between these two giants, both cutting loose from representational and tonal practices that had anchored the visual and musical arts.

With the soprano Susan Narucki, Ms. Rothenberg began with “Erwartung,” (“Expectation”), a short, pensive song by Schoenberg from 1899, a setting of a German poem by Richard Fedor Leopold Dehmel. The music clings just barely to the practices of tonal harmony.

Without stopping for applause (a request honored by the audience), Ms. Rothenberg then played Schoenberg’s Three Piano Piece, Op. 11 (1909), in which the break is all but decisive. Yet these searching, episodic pieces come right out of the late solo piano works by Brahms. Schoenberg picked up where Brahms left off.

Joined again by Ms. Narucki, who sang with a rich sound and shapely phrasing, Ms. Rothenberg offered songs composed between 1908 and 1915 by Berg, Webern and, of special interest, Thomas de Hartmann, a Russian composer who contributed to “The Blue Rider Almanac,” a collection of articles, drawings, musical scores and manifestos by members of the group. De Hartmann’s songs, in Russian, point back to his and Kandinsky’s roots in folk culture. And “Vers la Flamme,” an incandescent 1914 piano piece by Scriabin, with which Ms. Rothenberg ended the first half, showed another composer traveling a different harmonic path than Schoenberg’s, more steeped in color, but winding up almost in the same place.

The Brentano gave an excitingly restless and imaginative account of the Schoenberg string quartet. In the last two of the four movements Schoenberg included a part for soprano, performing settings of poems by Stefan George, which Ms. Narucki sang alluringly. By nature Schoenberg was a musician who valued order and tradition. He was forced, he often said, to become a radical. Harmony was stuck in place and in crisis.

The Second Quartet was path breaking. Still, Schoenberg’s uneasiness with his free-roaming harmonic language comes through. In adding the soprano part, he gave his audiences something to hang on to. Only when he invented his 12-tone technique did Schoenberg find a way to be radical and systematic at once.

But that is another story.

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