Making the Strings Sing Again

By Michael Walsh

The twin obstacles in the path of contemporary music are the past and the recent past. In the violin repertoire, the beloved romantic concertos have maintained such an iron grip on audience affections that even indisputable 20th century masterworks have been neglected in favor of the millionth performance of the Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky concertos. It has not helped that some compositions of the '50s and '60s amounted to teeth-grinding assaults on the instrument that made both soloists and audiences recoil.

But times are changing, and not a moment too soon. "The violin is being looked at again as a great singing instrument," says Virtuoso Isaac Stern, 65. "It is no longer being beaten, plucked, forced and squeezed." Perhaps as a result, the American orchestral scene has lately been a festival of new violin concertos.

During one five-week period last winter, the Philadelphia Orchestra offered the world premieres of challenging concertos by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Richard Wernick. In New York City in February, Elmar Oliveira gave the first performance of a lyrical new work by Hugh Aitken, while in Montreal, Stern contributed the North American premiere of French Composer Henri Dutilleux's impressionistic concerto. The same month Virtuoso Shlomo Mintz played Marc Neikrug's neoromantic concerto for the second time, having presented its world premiere in 1984. And this week Sergiu Luca will give the American premiere of William Bolcom's frisky new concerto in Pittsburgh (he introduced it in 1984 in Saarbrucken, West Germany).

"It is terrible to live under the onus of playing only masterpieces," says Luca, who has a small one in the Bolcom. "If I am able to enjoy the work and can convince someone else that it is enjoyable, then it's worth playing."

Bolcom's concerto is indeed that. The composer is probably better known as the peerless accompanist for his wife Mezzo Joan Morris in their programs of American popular songs. But his spacious cantata on Blake poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was in contention for 1985's Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto, a haunting, elegaic slow movement inspired by a mournful tune Bolcom heard whistled on the New York City subway and a riotous finale that is an homage to the late jazz fiddler Joe Venuti. Bright and accessible, the concerto is steeped in a popular idiom. "You don't have to tell people what it means," observes Luca, who is Rumanian born and Israeli raised. "The wonderful thing about playing it is that it is analogous to Mozart playing his works in Vienna. It is part of the lingo."

Not all the new concertos can make that claim, nor should they. "It takes a little time for the ear to adjust," says Oliveira, 35. "But there is no difference between a new piece and the Beethoven or Tchaikovsky concertos, if one interprets it with the same kind of strong projection." To prepare the Aitken premiere, Oliveira approached the fundamentally conservative score "pretty much the same way as an old one. The basic difference is that you have no familiarity with the work whatsoever. It takes an incredible amount of time to put a new piece together. If you are not well acquainted with the composer, you have to learn his language."

Aitken, 61, a Manhattan-born professor at William Paterson College in New Jersey, met Oliveira at a New Hampshire music festival and a few months later, sent him his new concerto. Oliveira liked it for the unabashed way it showed off the instrument's solo capabilities. "It took advantage of the virtuosity of the instrument as well as its singing, lyrical quality." At the performance, Oliveira brought his burnished tone and forthright style to bear in a strong, surging reading.

Such commitment is characteristic of all six violinists. In the recondite Wernick concerto, Gregory Fulkerson was dealt the toughest hand. Nonetheless, he says, "I approached it as if it were Brahms. I wanted to project mightily with a long line and rich, sumptuous sound throughout. You work hard to be on the same wavelength as the composer, whether he has been dead for 100 years or is alive now." He collaborated with the composer during a week of "intensive tinkering." If Wernick, for example, found Fulkerson's interpretation "too hot or too sweet," the soloist recalls, "he would say so and I would try to put it in a different context." Even Fulkerson's virile, muscular performance, however, could not compensate for the concerto's dated, highly chromatic idiom.

Far fresher is Neikrug's concerto, a back-to-the-future exercise that evokes the shades of Alban Berg--whose 1935 Violin Concerto remains the masterpiece of the genre in this century--Mahler and Wagner. By turns violent and passionate, the concerto explicitly reaches back to the solo violin's historic role as a dramatic protagonist. It is a splendid vehicle for Mintz, 28, a Soviet-born, Israeli-raised virtuoso whose fiery style is in the grand tradition of Leopold Auer and Jascha Heifetz. "A first performance is very exciting," says Mintz. "You feel you are opening pages in history."

For Norman Carol, concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Skrowaczewski (pronounced Skro-vah-cheff-ski) was a new experience: his first world premiere as a soloist. The two men have known each other as colleagues for more than a quarter-century, dating back to the time when Skrowaczewski was conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony (now Minnesota Orchestra) and Carol was its concertmaster."For the past five or six years, I have been urging him to write a piece for me," says Carol, and Skrowaczewski finally did.

The work is a free-tonal fantasy for the solo instrument, which is set off against an ensemble that includes bongos, gongs, chimes, temple blocks, harp, amplified harpsichord and vibraphone but omits the orchestra's trumpet and violin sections. It is a felicitous concept, but, alas, the composer's rather dogged quality of invention is not up to his orchestration. Despite a sturdy reading from Carol, the concerto lacks the strong stylistic profile that might have made it memorable.

The 20th century, says Stern, "is one of the richest periods in musical creativity." A discriminating advocate of contemporary violin music who has given premieres of concertos by William Schuman, George Rochberg and Krzysztof Penderecki, Stern has had a privileged view of modern musical history; in June he will premiere a work by Britain's iconoclastic Peter Maxwell Davies in Scotland. The phantasmagorical Dutilleux concerto was commissioned by Radio France in celebration of Stern's 60th birthday almost six years ago ("He had problems about coming to an end," says Stern, explaining the delay) and was first performed in Paris last November.

Stern says his role in the work's genesis was minor: "The only thing I can do as a performer is to give the benefit of what I know about the violin to help him say what he wants to say. I put my hands, heart and belief at his disposal." A complex, rhapsodic study in tone color, it is particularly well suited to Stern's soulful intonation and vibrant technical flair. "You have to study the whole score and put together the sound in your head totally," explains the soloist. "Then you take the work apart measure by measure. You must learn the work from the inside; you work slowly until it becomes yours." Stern's dashing reading with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal under Charles Dutoit convincingly stamped the piece as his.

A premiere, however, is only the beginning. As every contemporary composer with a once-performed piece moldering on the shelf knows, subsequent readings are hard to get. But new works need not be masterpieces to deserve further hearing; indeed, it is unreasonable to compare them immediately with their glorious predecessors. The inertia of the repertoire makes the path to acceptance an especially difficult one, requiring of both performers and listeners open minds and open ears. But it can be done. "I like the involvement with what is happening now, and with being a part of the sifting and winnowing-out process," says Fulkerson, explaining his advocacy of new music.

And if, as is likely, a new piece ultimately proves ephemeral, so what? Tastes change, and each generation has the right to its own repertoire, if only it will exercise it. Classical music need not be so unrelentingly obsessed with its place in history. "Think of forgotten music that was played in the past with gusto and pleasure," says Luca, perhaps recalling the ghosts of Spontini and Spohr. "I am willing to take a chance that someone down the road will decide one day not to play the piece." And instead of a war-horse, play something new.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York