Symphonic after all these years

TRY though it might, the 20th century could not kill off the symphony. On my CD player at the moment is the first recording of Valentin Silvestrov’s gelatinous Symphony No. 6, written a dozen years ago and released this month on ECM New Series. Also of recent vintage are recordings of Peteris Vasks’ obsessive Symphony No. 3 (2005) on Ondine and Philip Glass’ thumping Symphony No. 8 (2006) on the composer’s own Orange Mountain Music label.

These are big, magnificent orchestral exercises, grandly conceived. The Silvestrov is nearly an hour, Vasks’ comes in at 42 minutes, and Glass’ is only slightly shorter. They are abstract scores, their composers content to manipulate musical themes without worrying about much apart from the music, just as the Classical style dictated.

But these works are also decadent, full of excess. And that is the surprising bit. If up-to-date symphonies can be vital, fresh, exciting, distinct, interesting, unusual, weirdly haunting, mystifying -- and I think all those adjectives apply at some point in each of the three -- that means the genre has somehow survived a debauched phase since at least 1911, the year Mahler’s heart gave out while he was finishing his 10th Symphony. When genres start to go, they tend to go quickly. Ten, 20 years of dissolution is a pretty good run. A century of decadence is impressive.

The modern symphony -- a term from the Greek that means “sounding together” -- is a product of mid-18th century triviality. It developed in Mannheim, Germany. The town had a flashy orchestra that was known for its “rockets” and “steamrollers,” and these special instrumental effects proved the perfect tool with which J.S. Bach’s sons -- along with other Young Turks -- could rebel against the old man and the complexity of the High Baroque.

Haydn began writing his symphonies in the 1760s, followed by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Before long, the symphony became sophisticated, embracing all the latest thinking about harmony, rhythm and form. The conventional four-movement, carefully argued Classical symphony typically lasted half an hour or less. Beethoven’s Ninth, which he started sketching in 1812 and premiered in 1824, lasts about 80 minutes. It begins with what could be an evocation of the starry cosmos. It famously ends with a chorus and four vocal soloists gloriously extolling brotherly love.

With the Ninth, Beethoven begat symphonic bloat. A century of stretching -- metastasizing? -- began. Harmony grew more chromatic. Musical forms became more fluid. By 1830, Berlioz was using the symphony as a nightmarish confessional in “Symphonie Fantastique.”

Later in the 19th century, Bruckner and Mahler institutionalized symphonic gigantism. Bruckner’s mighty sound praised God. Mahler brought the world into his monumental orchestral masterpieces by incorporating folk and popular music. He praised and doubted God. He approached the symphony as if it were an autobiographical musical novel.

But Mahler’s Modernist disciples -- Schoenberg, Berg and Webern -- saw the symphony as a dead end, the last explosion of Romanticism. The genre lost its hold on the most progressive French composers -- Debussy and Ravel -- as well. Two years after Mahler’s death, Stravinsky changed music in Paris not with a symphony but with “The Rite of Spring,” a ballet.

The symphony persisted in Germany, Austria and France mainly as a reactionary mainstay. But it took root elsewhere, acquiring a nationalist character in Finland (Sibelius), Denmark (Nielsen), Mexico (Chavez), Brazil (Villa Lobos), Britain (notably Vaughn Williams) and America (with Ives, Copland, Bernstein, Henry Cowell and several others in competition to write the Great American Symphony). Many composers today simply write orchestral pieces and give them fanciful names.

Only in Russia and the onetime Soviet satellites has the symphony thrived in a direct line between the 19th and 21st centuries. It has been the rare Russian composer who has not been a symphonist. Despite the difficulty involved, Prokofiev and Shostakovich symphonically weathered Stalinist storms.

The latter’s 15 symphonies, written between 1926 and 1971, are an uneven bunch. The first bursts forth with a 19-year-old’s exuberance. The 15th is slow, sardonic, death-haunted. These works’ political significance can be argued over, but not the fact that they graphically charted the composer’s wildly changing emotional states, which were often directly related to the behavior of Lenin and then Stalin.

An unkind denigration, less heard lately than it was a few years ago, is that Shostakovich’s symphonies are warmed-over Mahler. Whether that is so or not, Shostakovich’s symphonic self-indulgence had a huge effect on the musical life of the Soviet Union. He had found a way to express himself in an environment of censorship, and Mahler was the model.

Memory and meaning

SILVESTROV is Ukrainian. Vasks is Latvian. The Baltimore-born Glass is all-American, though he is the son of Lithuanian immigrants. All three of their recently recorded symphonies are post-Shostakovich works that hark back to Bruckner (Glass), Mahler (Silvestrov), and Sibelius and Nielsen (Vasks).

In fact, Silvestrov doesn’t just hark back to Mahler -- he is utterly obsessed with the Adagietto movement of Mahler’s Fifth. The Silvestrov Sixth is in five connected movements with a 25-minute slow movement at the center. Tempo markings run the gamut from vivace to adagio. But even after several listenings, I’ve never found myself feeling grounded in any movement or tempo. The impression is of being suspended in an orchestral sea. Little melodic motifs float through the green brine. The seascape is changing, but the environment is ever the same. Lush, Mahler-like material suggests seaweed. It clings, a little slimy but wondrous.

Mahler, for Silvestrov, is memory filtered through time -- as perhaps we now must all hear Mahler with our changed symphonic sensibilities. Yet I don’t really know what to make of Silvestrov’s Sixth. His Fifth is similarly “Mahlerian” but a bit prettier. He has written a Seventh, not yet recorded. The CD booklet doesn’t help. Silvestrov refers to his “metasymphonies.” A German writer claims the Sixth’s opening Andantino utters “a profession of faith.” I’m assuming that is a faith in the survival of the symphony, distended though Silvestrov’s may have become. The performance by Andrey Boreyko conducting the SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra is compelling.

Vasks’ Third Symphony sounds more traditional at first, so long as one doesn’t pay too much attention to the composer’s intention. “What do I want to speak of with this Symphony?” Vasks asks rhetorically in his CD’s booklet. “The beauty of God’s world,” he answers. He also brings up “love and loyalty to ideals” and “the endless struggle between light and darkness.”

The symphony is in a single movement. It begins with a rapt melodic gesture, Sibelian maybe, or even Vaughn Williams-like. But Vasks soon fixates on a motif, and most of the work is a process not of variation but of un-fixation. It’s as if he might get the motif out of his head if he can twirl the thing in enough different ways, distort it, give it ever weirder instrumental contexts. I hear Nielsen in all this; Shostakovich’s technique was to wrestle a theme to the ground.

Again, I couldn’t begin to figure out what this symphony means, although as an expression of loyalty to ideals seems a far-fetched way of thinking about it. But its sonic world is distinct and gripping. The Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by John Storgards on the recording, which is a Super Audio CD, and given the sheer beauty of the sounds revealed on it, maybe I’ll buy the business about God’s world.

The direct approach

“SYMPHONY NO. 8,” Glass writes, “represents a return ... to orchestral music where the subject of the work is the language of music itself, as in the tradition of the 18th and 19th century symphonies.” Actually, the language is the Glass style, his pounding ostinatos and arpeggios -- the stuff of postmodern Mannheim rockets and steamrollers -- along with his somber minor-key melodies (his Lithuanian roots?).

The real reference in this steamrolling symphony, though, is to Bruckner. Composed for Germany’s Bruckner Orchestra Linz, which recorded it under Dennis Russell Davies, the score contains some of Glass’ richest orchestral writing. Like Bruckner, he builds monuments of sound, dramatically shifting from one sort of brick to another.

Eight themes bounce back and forth in the 20-minute first movement. The harmonies in Glass’ late style have grown rich and chromatic. He’s gotten into lavish counterpoint. Unlike the enigmatic wonder of Silvestrov or the musical fetishism of Vasks, Glass’ approach is direct. What you hear -- one theme following another, a slew of crescendos, a sad song played again and again -- is what you get. God is not needed. Nor is history.

Still, the result is curiously and intriguingly complex. I know of no composer these days who trusts himself more than Glass. His is not music of self-doubt. Like Bruckner, he has an instinctive gift for making a churning orchestra seem like a mystical conveyance.

For symphonies to live, they ultimately need to be heard live. Silvestrov and Vasks lack champions at U.S. orchestras (although St. Louis’ David Robertson recorded Silvestrov’s Fifth in Germany a dozen years ago). Glass, for his part, could use a few more boosters. But Marin Alsop is one, and she will give his Eighth Symphony its West Coast premiere at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz on Aug. 11.

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mark.swed@latimes.com