Oh, So Close to Being Transfigured

Sunday afternoon, a lovely L.A. early spring day, the Los Angeles Philharmonic brought to an end its Schoenberg Prism with magical night music. It was but a small disconnect in an Oscar-ized city that had already begun to unveil a very different kind of magical night to project to the wide world.

The performance of Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night,” played by the orchestra’s string section and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, was gorgeous. This is readily accessible Schoenberg, written in the twilight of the 19th century, drenched in Wagner’s erotic harmonies and silken string textures.

But “Transfigured Night” Sunday served merely as prelude to the concert’s big event, the Philharmonic’s first performance of Mahler’s massive early cantata, “Das Klagende Lied” for huge orchestra, offstage band, choruses and several vocal soloists. That meant that the Schoenberg Prism, a festival tribute that revolved around the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death in Los Angeles in 1951 and which had opened in October with his Piano Concerto (1942), wound down with an anticlimax. It ended where it might have profitably begun--namely, seducing an audience often skeptical about Schoenberg.

The festival, which included the participation of many other arts organizations and educational institutions, was incomplete and often disappointing. For all the various symposiums, there was only occasional substance and far too little central planning. Schoenberg the Angeleno got lip service (far more substantive explorations of his West Coast years have recently been undertaken at Bard College in New York and in Vienna). Indeed, surprisingly little of Schoenberg’s music from Los Angeles, where he wrote both approachable and arcane music, was explored.

Where, for instance, was Lou Harrison, the most important living composer to have studied with Schoenberg and the dean of California music? And did no one think to involve the composer and author Allen Shawn? His excellent book “Schoenberg’s Journey” has just been published, and last month the Monterey Symphony premiered a work it commissioned from him in honor of the John Steinbeck centenary. That there might be a connection between populist Steinbeck and Schoenberg (the writer was a fan) reflects a richer Schoenberg Prism than the Philharmonic’s narrow focus.

The Schoenberg events never created a buzz equivalent to that of the Philharmonic’s Ligeti and Stravinsky festivals in previous seasons. Instead, his music was offered as something to be confronted gingerly. Still, there were highlights, such as Salonen’s fine job of explaining and conducting the Five Pieces for Orchestra at the end of October. And in the final week of the festival, there was a last-minute flurry of Schoenberg performances of great immediacy by Peter Serkin at the Chandler, the Arditti Quartet at Caltech, and the Leipzig String Quartet in a stunning account of the Third Quartet in the excitingly close quarters of the Villa Aurora.

In the context of last week’s Schoenberg feast, the Philharmonic’s performance of “Transfigured Night” was dessert. Six years ago, Salonen made a sleek, edgy, Modernist-leaning recording of the work with the Stockholm Chamber Orchestra. Sunday, he took a slower, more sumptuous approach. No longer sounding as if he had something to prove, he now conducted it simply as if he loved the score, and, perhaps, that sense of closer attachment to Schoenberg by orchestra and conductor will prove the Prism’s true legacy.

“Das Klagende Lied” (The Plaintive Song) made Mahler’s name in 1880, as “Transfigured Night” made Schoenberg’s some 20 years later. Mahler wrote his own text, based upon a fairy tale of fratricide and a magical flute, for the hourlong score, and he threw into it everything he could possibly think of. It’s so unwieldy that Mahler later revised it, pairing down the extravagant orchestration and cutting it by a third. But it has become the fashion to present it in its original form, and that is what the Philharmonic did.

Salonen corralled his large forces with spectacular control. Where he luxuriated in Schoenberg, he went for maximum dramatic punch in the Mahler. The Los Angeles Master Chorale made an incisive contribution. There were six vocal soloists. Last-minute substitutions, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung and tenor Michael Schade (who bravely agreed to perform even though he was appearing in “The Magic Flute” that evening) assured an excellent adult quartet, which also included soprano Christine Brewer and baritone Nathan Gunn. Two boy soloists, Philip Nowotny and Peter Mair, were powerful and intense.

And so, with an enormous gust of sound and forceful drama, Mahler’s cantata blew Schoenberg off the scene. But it also filled in the one missing gap in the Philharmonic’s Mahler repertory.