concert review: Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra

I was less than excited to be sent to review a concert with Schoenberg and Mahler in it. But the Schoenberg was Verklärte Nacht which is tonal and was not played too goopily; and the Mahler was a brief cycle of very early songs, and hence as unobjectionable as Mahler can get. And to go with this, Beethoven's Seventh, an old favorite played with the tires squealing as it rocketed down the street.

This was not just the concert. The performers were here for a week to work with students, so I enriched my experience by going to the public events on Wednesday. This included a long concert of mostly very dull music by Mahler and the Second Viennese School; a talk with Verbier Festival administrators, who explained how and why the festival works and what this touring orchestra has to do with it; and, in the morning, a master class with the orchestra's conductor and some of the groups that would play that evening.

The conductor's accent was almost impenetrable (yes, this was the same guy who read the Verklärte Nacht poem aloud before the performance, with results as you might expect), but I tried my best to follow him. When the high school string quartet played the Webern Bagatelles, he told them they were very good (which they certainly were) but that they were too intellectual; their performance needed more emotion. He said that composers encode the emotions they want to express in the score, and that performers need to bring those out and convey them to the audience - gesturing to those of us gathered to listen to the session. He took the leader's violin and showed what he meant. Essentially it amounted to adding more variation in dynamics and tone color to the playing.

And I thought: what good is it to 'add emotion' to music when there's no emotion to be had? This is Webern! The driest, most dessicated and cryptic composer in the western repertoire. Maybe a few connoisseurs will appreciate it, but there is no emotion in Webern that can be conveyed to a general classical audience. No matter what you do, it doesn't come across as emotion. It's eloquence in an alien language. Try this on something that actually has some emotional content.

Anyway, I didn't hear any effective difference in the performance afterwards, although I hear master classes entirely reworking students' playing styles all the time.