Symphony Review: A Pair of Musical Humorists, Strauss and Shostakovich, at the Jacobs

When it comes to musical humor, one thing’s for sure: To be funny in sound is not like a joke in language whose weird setup (a priest, a lawyer, and a jackass walk into a bar) is upended by a punchline and a bellylaugh. Instead, amusing music follows its own rules.

It’s imitative, say, the trumpet whinnying like a horse in Leroy Andersen’s “Sleigh Ride.” It’s deliberate such as Mozart adding wrong notes to a string piece to lampoon “the work of incompetent composers.” It’s outlandish as with Haydn in Symphony 94, subtitled “Surprise,” when he follows a simple pianissimo melody with a roof-raising double forte chord, intended, legend has it, to wake up a slumbering audience.

It can also be parodic, a bit boffo or topsy-turvy, such as the scherzo — Italian, for joke — whose finest practitioner, Beethoven, used the form for several syncopated and playful third movements, respites from the harder edges of symphonic logic. The most madcap and beloved of all comic portrayals in sound is Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, immortalized by Disney’s Fantasia with Mickey Mouse. the hapless assistant. The impish work proves music can wheedle a grim pantomime as long as there’s a staccato bassoon tune accompanying row upon row of bewitched water-lugging brooms.

The grandmaster of the seriously humorous orchestral work is Richard Strauss who when young perfected the tone poem (after Liszt’s symphonic poem), which depicts narrative legends with scene-painted episodes, lovely and droll. Two of Strauss’s late 19^th-century gems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspielgel’s Merry Pranks, were paraded with party panache by the San Diego Symphony this past weekend (I attended Sunday) turning the new Jacobs Music Center into a pleasure dome of erudite fun.

Don Juan (1888) stands on the shoulders of Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, a reckoning for a Casanova who, so it’s said, seduced 1,003 women (mille e tre, in Espana alone). Strauss’s dandy is much less randy. He pursues ladies with Man-of-La-Mancha nobility, that is, until he’s thwarted by a pair of coquettish independent women.

One possible romance is sketched by a gorgeous longing motif on oboe, played with evocative restraint by the symphony’s Sarah Skuster. More conquests feature Strauss’s dazzling orchestral crescendos, sinister brass passages, embroidered flights of strings, all laughing at the Don’s eccentricities, his courtly machismo, his schmaltzy ardor.

Finally, a protective uncle of one woman challenges him with what is audibly a fine bit of swordsmanship. Eventually, exhausted, he gives up and love and honor win. He dies away, not to fiery hell like Don Giovanni, but to pulselessness, the worst musical fate. Conductor Raphael Payare opened this tone poem too loud, the quickly adjusted the brass and other runaways into symphonic balance. It took a while but he got them there.

Don Juan began the concert (two Shostakovich piano concertos were packed between) and it ended with the showstopper Till Eulenspielgel’s Merry Pranks (1895). Till is the closest thing we have to a musical picaresque — the escapades of a legendary German scallywag. His puckish character is announced by a French horn, a famously sassy line that swivels on a few chromatic ticks up the scale, is repeated, passed to oboe, to clarinet, then, lustily, to winds and strings and brass, sped up, combined in a whirling tutti ascent, and stops, Boom! Till gallops into a public square, the clarinet, animating his presence with a cheeky bit of lip.

Disguised as a priest, he mocks religious piety and swipes the offerings; in a modest cloak, he tries to tempt a group of young women, is denied, and chased away by righteous intolerants; in his scholar’s garb, he takes on the Philistines, a claque of critics (Strauss despised music writers) who believe his anti-bourgeois values are worthy of further study only to invite Till’s scorn. With each trespass, the rake gets a thumping, is run out, and, no wiser for the wrong, seeks greater havoc. Alas, the joke’s on him.

Strauss’s virtuosic orchestration features clarinets feigning wedding tunes, the brass instruments sliding and spitting notes with clownish glee, the violins trilling like morning birds over the melee. Cornered at last, Till is arrested, judged guilty of chaos, sentenced to death, dragged to the gallows — all in brief musical interludes — and, with his neck in the noose, he’s poised to drop. 

That’s the standard “program note” fate for the rascal — he’s hung. I see it otherwise. I think it’s a mock execution because Till’s theme, the boyish smirk from the clarinet, is heard once more and elicits no orchestral response. Choose your own ending: death or rebirth.

The Till performance was sonically commanding, best of show. I got the feeling that Payare was testing the hall’s boundaries. This piece’s bluster runs the gamut from loud to very loud, perfect for measuring the absorbent surfaces in the new venue. Indeed, the zesty tempo the heel-rocking Payare got going had the orchestra romping in ecstacy. Speaking of good humor, I mentioned to the couple behind me that I heard more than a few of their chortles at Till’s insolent escapes to which they tittered and fessed up.

aThe two quirky, virtuosic Shostakovich piano concertos, as I say, were squeezed between the two Strauss works. Beyond virtuosic, the Israeli Inon Barnatan executed the pair with maniacal rapture. Dmitri Shostakovich was no stranger to program music, writing oodles of it (the artistic kind) for Comrade Stalin in the 1930s and 40s: the tragi-comic Fifth Symphony that thumbed its nose at Dear Leader and the Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad,” with its terrorizing invasion theme, based on a true Nazi story.

The Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Minor (1933) is a kind of double concerto for piano and trumpet with strings underpinning their witty dialogue. The piece burbles along with a vague satiric bent, the often-underused trumpet, played crisply by Paul Merkelo, lending color contrasts to the piano’s wild excess. Shostakovich said, self-congratulatorily, that the piece’s “artistic theme” was “absolutely superfluous,” meaning he wrote the diabolical work for himself to premiere at the piano. Barnatan nailed that superfluousness with seeming ease.

The concerto hurries from short lyric contemplation to tipsy galops and can-cans, sounding to me like a calliope egging on a troop of circus tumblers. The composer adds jazz riffs, a slice of ragtime, a Haydn quotation, Beethoven’s “Rage Over a Lost Penny,” leaping from and back to the fast and furious theme. The middle movement is a lento of pure Russian nostalgia with muted trumpet who oddly has to wait till the end for his solo. In the finale, Merkelo pulsates notes like a machine gunner, pushing the plate-spinning fun forward and countering the piano’s irreverence. 

Again, with the Piano Concerto No. 2 (1957), the composer pooh-poohed the piece, saying “it had no redeeming artistic merits.” The purer the music, for Shostakovich, the more unredeemable. Still, No. 2 has the pianist starting off in a happy-go-lucky vein until his alter-ego takes over, and he’s jolted into cartoonish acrobatics at the keyboard.

The final bravura movement is wickedly hard to play; Barantan does it ferociously well. Like a bull-rider, he wrangles the whirlwind, he’s stays with it, and he doesn’t let go. He sets the orchestra’s fiery pace (Payare, a willing conscript), and he and the ensemble trade licks in 7/8-time, creating a kind of flawless chaos, like water cataracting over boulders. 

The middle movement adds a beatific, Chopinesque quiet, a sudden contrast to the fun, as if such gentleness in a circus act is out of place. But it feels right, and it’s hard to say why. It appears Shostakovich can’t help but cast his lyrical spell whenever he’s so moved. Who can second guess him? As fast as he assembles his antic complexity, he shifts the mood, like a sorcerer, to a lullaby calm.

Journalist, memoirist, critic, Thomas Larson archives on his website nearly 500 publications over the past 30 years as well as information about his five books, editing services, and new writing every few weeks. He lives in San Diego, CA.