The Long Beach SO Celebrates Its 90th Birthday In Style

l-r: Roger Wilkie (concertmaster), Chloé Tardif (principal second violin), Eckart Preu (Music Director), Andrew Duckles (principal viola), and Cécilia Tsan (principal cello), after their performance of Anna Clyne’s Quarter Days for string quartet and orchestra.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach

DAVID J BROWN

The Long Beach Symphony Orchestra is making a very big deal of this being its 90th anniversary season, and so it should. For any performing body devoted to large-scale “classical” music to survive that long in a country which, unlike much of mainland Europe, does not by and large regard government support for the arts as vital, is an achievement indeed. And that’s not counting the last 90 years’ socio-political upheavals.

Though the present LBSO survived World War 2, the 2008 Great Recession, and the Covid pandemic, its predecessor in Long Beach succumbed to the Great Depression of 1929. However—and characteristic of the USA—it was individual enthusiasm, expertise, and funding that pulled together a new orchestra for the city, and on February 16, 1935, the then Long Beach Philharmonic (“Philharmonic” was replaced by “Symphony” in the name after WW2) gave its first concert under the baton of Fort MacArthur band-master Robert Resta (1891-1979), who after his departure in 1955 was named Founder Conductor of the orchestra.

Robert Resta.

That first concert mustered an impressive 87 players (extra strings, or doubled woodwind, one wonders?) and its program was a marvelously heterogeneous mix of short pieces by no fewer than 11 composers, from Max Reger to Johann Strauss. It opened with Beethoven’s Overture to Egmont, Op. 84, and without implying any shade on those intrepid pioneers under Maestro Resta, I wonder whether their performance could possibly have surpassed that from today’s orchestra on the first Saturday in October under his successor and LBSO’s sixth Music Director, Eckart Preu, played as a deliberate callback to that inaugural performance.

In his pre-concert talk Preu had sketched in the background: Goethe’s 1787 play Egmont that dramatized the life, fight against injustice, and death of the titular hero; Beethoven’s reverence for the great writer and eagerness to compose incidental music for the play’s revival in Vienna in 1809; the correspondence and single meeting in 1812 of the two German creative giants; and how vividly Beethoven’s overture encapsulates the essence of Goethe’s drama.

Beethoven and Goethe taking a walk in the German spa town
Teplitz, July 1812: etching by Ernst Pickardt (1876-1931).

This was faithfully bodied forth in the performance, from the LBSO strings’ trenchant attack on the opening motif and the plaintive eloquence of the winds’ response, through the unhurried but sweepingly intense and coherent account of the main body of the piece, leading to the martyrdom of Egmont (as vivid a musical coup de grâce as that of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel), and then the final triumph, with the piccolo shrilling at the top of its lungs above the tumult. It was an auspicious start indeed to this celebratory concert.

Maestro Preu’s programming as Music Director has maintained a judicious balance between the familiar and the new, and the evening’s concerto was certainly of the latter. This was the third time he has included a piece by Anna Clyne (b. 1980), following his inclusion of her string piece Within Her Arms in the 2017 Veterans Day concert and the cello+orchestra DANCE in February 2022 (reviewed here and here).

Anna Clyne.

She describes her Quarter Days for string quartet and orchestra as “a reflection on the passing of time – both within a minute, a day, through the seasons and within a lifetime,” with specific inspiration drawn from the initial 10 lines of Burnt Norton, the first of the four long poems that comprise T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. “Quarter days” is a British term that approximates to the autumn and spring equinoxes and winter and summer solstices, and thus Clyne’s four movements amount to a “four seasons”—which at around 22 minutes she gets through in less time than either Piazzolla or Vivaldi, not to mention the evening-long splendor of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons or Raff's quartet of Symphonies 8-11.

The string quartet for this performance were four of the LBSO’s own stars: Roger Wilkie (concertmaster), and section principals Chloé Tardif (second violin), Andrew Duckles (viola), and Cécilia Tsan (cello), playing with all the skill and commitment one would expect, whether in solo passages, duetting, or collectively. As for the work itself, it raised the interesting question of how unmistakably representational can music be if you don’t know in advance what it’s supposed to be representing.

Roger Wilkie, Chloé Tardif, Andrew Duckles, Cécilia Tsan.

In this case, the opening movement’s easeful harvest-home character seemed appropriate to autumn, while its successor had a somewhat chillier feel, with a stepwise motif on low horns that slightly brought to mind the Bydlo movement from Mussorgsky’s Pictures in Ravel’s orchestration.

If winter was the work’s “slow movement,” then spring was its scherzo, with skittering, April-showery textures and a contrasting “trio” section. Summer, with nothing of Vivaldi’s heat exhaustion, led off with insistent pulsing akin to Bernard Herrmann’s title music for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, against which Mr. Wilkie spun an eloquent high-lying violin melody.

Quarter Days was certainly easy on the ear, but no more than any other of Clyne’s work I’ve heard did it clarify why she should have become one of the most-performed living British composers (heaven forfend that it’s for any reason other than pure musical worth). But on the other hand it didn’t prompt the “Thank goodness that’s over / I never want to hear that again” response that some new music (and to be fair, some old too) generates.

Antonin Dvořák with pigeons.

After the interval, the crowd-pleasing blockbuster was Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor “From the New World” Op. 95 B. 178, a self-confessed favorite of Maestro Preu. in his pre-concert talk he vividly conjured up the composer’s 1892-1895 tenure as Director of the recently established National Conservatory of Music of America in New York: eagerly absorbing African-American musical influences, obsessively train-spotting with a fellow enthusiast, feeding pigeons in Central Park, and of course, composing his most famous symphony as well as other works.

Adam Richardson sings Goin' Home.

Before the "New World," however, there was a kind of “trailer,” the arrangement made in 1922 by William Arms Fisher (1861-1948), one of Dvořák’s Conservatory students, of the famous English horn melody from the symphony’s Largo. With Fisher’s own words added, this became Goin’ Home, sung here with restrained but heartfelt sonority by the baritone Adam Richardson and rapturously received by the audience.

As for the symphony itself, the performance was as vibrantly fresh as if it was a welcome new discovery for all concerned, rather than one of the most familiar of repertoire works. If not up to Dvořák’s very fleet metronome mark of eighth note = 126, the first movement’s Adagio introduction moved purposefully forward rather than being the dreamy wallow some performances deliver, and the unison horns’ immaculate opening to the main Allegro molto, as bold and bright as it was observant of the dynamic markings, confirmed earlier indications that they were having a very good night.

The “New World” was Dvořák’s only symphony after the Sixth in which he marked the first movement exposition to be repeated, but though he includes four first-time lead-back measures, its observation often does deliver a jolt, and in an interpretation as dynamic and forward-thrusting as Preu’s, going “back to the beginning” would have felt wrong. The Largo was no more a wallow than that first movement introduction had been, with Joseph Stone’s delivery of the English horn solo more plaintive than nostalgically romantic, and the whole orchestra delivering beautifully aerated textures throughout.

In keeping with the interpretation as a whole, the Scherzo was crisp and clean, and though Dvořák does not mark the Finale to follow attacca, Preu’s doing so not only avoided annoying inter-movement applause but, more importantly, maintained and tightened the already-present tension by observing to the full the Finale's marking of Allegro con fuoco.

Driven thus, the movement was convulsively dramatic, even sounding something of a cri de cœur, with the whole orchestra individually and collectively at the top of its game. Coming it at just under 40 minutes, this performance of the "New World" was the perfect antidote to any prior thoughts of “not that old warhorse again?” and was duly cheered to the rafters by the near-capacity audience.

With the orchestra clearly in such fine shape, and the news this week that it has received the largest grant in its 90-year history, let’s hope that Long Beach music-lovers not yet born will celebrate another 90 years' success in 2114, and of course, other anniversaries in between. Meanwhile the next concert of the current celebratory year, highlighting this time American music of the 20th and 21st centuries, can be enjoyed on November 9.

Kelly Ruggirello, LBSO President, talks to audience members at the post-concert champagne reception in the Terrace Theater foyer.

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Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Beverly O'Neill Performing Arts Center, Long Beach, Saturday, October 5, 2024, 7.30 p.m.

Images: The performance: Todd Mason (top) and Caught in the Moment Photography; Robert Resta and string soloists: courtesy Long Beach Symphony; Beethoven and Goethe: Wiener Antiquariat; Anna Clyne: Christina Kernohan; Dvořák: Wikimedia Commons.

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