ASO Plays Kurth, Bernstein, Beethoven: Between the Ephemeral and the Eternal

Composer Michael Kurth's photo of graffiti that inspired his piece.

There's an essential mystery about live music, according to program notes by Michael Kurth, composer and bass player with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.  He writes about what he had in mind titling his orchestral suite "Everything Lasts Forever."  

The individual qualities of each performance are what make live concerts irreplaceable.  Music's delicate and never-ending balance between the ephemeral and the eternal is a source of its mystery and joy, and a temporal art form such as music has the remarkable capacity to communicate to its audience with immediacy and insight.  And its audience, in turn, is able to respond viscerally, at the moment of the art's live creation.  I hope audiences find my music appealing, ... and that the memory of the feelings they experienced stay with them for a long time -- but above all, I hope they find the joy and exhilaration of live music irresistible and keep coming back for more.   

We had a lot of joy and exhilaration Saturday night.  Atlanta's Symphony Orchestra played to a packed house. People around me looked fascinated or delighted.  In the first half, we jumped up to applaud Michael Kurth for his composition as he hugged conductor Robert Spano; and again we stood for Bernstein's First Symphony, conductor Robert Spano, his orchestra, and mezzo-soprano  Jennifer Johnson Cano.  After intermission, we cheered encouragement to young assistant conductor Stephen Mulligan who made his regular season debut unexpectedly because venerable Robert Spano went home to nurse his flu.  Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, with Jorge Federico Osorio at the piano, was much more familiar than the other two pieces, and a delight.

Years after I wrote about Kurth's piece, I'd forgotten all about it, and all about the graffiti on local landmarks that inspired each movement.  But the experience was once again just what I wrote then:    Images of feet by a tagger with moniker “Toes” suggested a foot-stomp motif that kicked off the piece.  Dancing around different sections of the orchestra, these stomps developed through different colors and moods.  A black-and-white image of a bird to which some tagger later added a red heart, inspired “Bird Song Love.”  It’s a simple song played first on celesta, repeated with new colors added on top, until it developed into something much bigger for full orchestra.  The foot stomps returned in the sweet third movement, "We Have All the Time in the World," but gently this time, to tie the piece together in a way that satisfied and charmed. (View more)

Probably more than anyone in the house, I know the Bernstein piece by heart, having listened for years to an LP of the composer conducting it.  I tensed with anticipation of my favorite moment, and then felt great satisfaction as a sweet melody rose up over the percussive "Profanation" of the second movement.  As Kurth observes, the music had its ephemeral visceral effect, apart from my life-long memory of the music.   

Ditto, for all of us, that moment in the Emperor Concerto described  by Ken Meltzer in the program:

Toward the conclusion of [the second movement], one of several masterstrokees in this work creates a moment of incomparable magic.  After a sudden and unexpected shift from B to B-flat, the soloist quietly entices the listener with fragments of the principal theme of the spirited finale, which follows without pause.

The fact that we may have heard the piece scores of times on recordings and concerts doesn't inoculate us against the effect of live music. 

Part of the superlative effect is simply acoustic, I'm sure.  Another part is the investment that hundreds of us have made to be there: money, time, preparation.  There's a visual element, as we see so many musicians intent on their separate parts, moving in concert with the conductor's hands.  Then, the music's shared.  And, as we apprehend it, it's gone.  Listening to a recording is like looking at a photo album of a loved place. For pieces I've never heard live, the recording is good; live is better.