By Lawrence Toppman
The least interesting things about the Charlotte Symphony (CSO) concert billed as “Wagner & Strauss” were the pieces by Wagner and Strauss. The orchestra gave workmanlike performances of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s opera “Tristan and Isolde” and Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration,” occasionally rising higher than that level Friday at Knight Theater.
But in the middle of this Death Sandwich came two pieces bursting with life by Oskar Böhme and Julia Perry. CSO principal trumpeter Alex Wilborn played Böhme’s trumpet concerto vivaciously, and guest conductor JoAnn Falletta gave us her best in Perry’s too-brief “A Short Piece for Orchestra.”
Symphony management unwisely scheduled two weighty pieces by the two Richards in the same night. Those premiered just 25 years apart (1865 for Wagner, 1890 for Strauss) and have similar musical arcs: Both begin with mysterious tremblings, build slowly and repetitively to passionate climaxes, then ebb away into the uneasy peace of death for love (Wagner) and the peace that passeth all understanding (Strauss).
Falletta and the CSO handled them the same way: Weakly and without sufficient atmosphere in the beginning, focusing the energy better midway, then with belated but powerful passion in the climaxes and beyond. I wish I’d heard the Wagner as it was written – a soprano is supposed to sing the Liebestod section – but much of the feeling still came through.
The musicians and the maestro seemed happier bringing us music none of us knew. My notes for Perry’s piece compare her to Leonard Bernstein in his Oscar-nominated film score for “On the Waterfront:” a dramatic opening statement that reappears in subtle ways, a melancholic solo for flute and other woodwinds, a sharp and sudden ending.
Then I learned that Perry wrote her piece in 1952, two years before the movie. Did the two know each other from the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood? Maybe New York City, where she went to the Juilliard School? Was it coincidence that, as the revised “Study for Orchestra” in 1965, this became the first piece by an African-American woman programmed by the New York Philharmonic — and Bernstein was the music director? (William Steinberg conducted it.)
Both Perry and Böhme had hard lives. She fell into financial difficulties and died of a stroke at 55 in 1979. One of Stalin’s flunkies declared him an enemy of the Soviet state in 1938 because of his German heritage; he was tortured and executed after “confessing” imagined sins. (I refer you to the CSO’s excellent program notes.)
Böhme’s trumpet concerto came from happier times in 1899, when he’d just moved to St. Petersburg from Budapest and was playing cornet at the Mariinsky Theatre. Like Chopin, he had happy ideas about writing for his instrument but vague notions of how to orchestrate. So the backing sounds now like Weber in its leaping excitement, now like Schumann in its surging pulse, now like Elgar in odd bursts of dignified grandeur. The orchestral sections don’t always relate to the solos: Those are mostly histrionic in the first movement, tender in the second and merry in the third, but often on an intimate scale.
Wilborn embraced the difficulties with gusto. He’s not a flamboyant player, but his oral and digital dexterity served the tricky writing well. My notes during the third movement say “Reminds me of “Variations on ‘The Carnival of Venice’,” a notoriously tough piece by Jean-Baptiste Arban that preceded Böhme’s concerto by a few decades.
Sure enough, Wilborn came back to play Arban’s variations with flying fingers and tongue and the kind of showmanship this chestnut requires. The rain of applause for his encore was not for a hometown favorite but for a talented musician.
Pictured: JoAnn Falletta by Steve J. Sherman.