“Transfigured Notes”: Schoenberg Transfigured Night, Babbitt Transfigured Notes, Stravinsky Concerto in D. String Orchestra, cond. Gunther Schuller. GM Recordings GM2060CD (1998) barcode 781007206021
Recorded live 8 & 9 February 1991, Jordan Hall, Boston
A lake? An ocean? No, a maelstrom
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 12 August 2013
The story of how this disc came into existence, as recounted by Gunther Schuller in the liner notes, is as fascinating as its content. In the mid 1980s, for the celebrations of the bicentennial of the Constitution, Ricardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned a piece for strings from Babbitt and he duly delivered. A first conductor was appointed to conduct it and he couldn’t get the orchestra to play it in the allotted rehearsal time. Muti reprogrammed it the next season and a second conductor tried again, and cancelled again (Schuller is courteous enough not to give the names, but a quick search on the Internet shows that in fact three conductors and attempts were involved, Erich Leinsdorf, Dennis Russell Davies and Hans Vonk), and the Orchestra management proclaimed the work “unplayable”. Not from Schuller’s pen but from the online article I found on this, the comments of Richard Wernick who acted as the orchestra’s adviser in commissioning the work from Babbitt and “calls himself an ‘admirer of Babbitt’s beautiful music’ He said that he would propose that Babbitt ‘re-imagine, reconceive the piece for nine instruments.’ ‘I think it is possible for one player to perform (each part of) the music when asking five or six to do it exactly together is not,’ Wernick said. ‘I don’t know if he will think about that or not. I believe it was a miscalculation on his part. We have all done it. Even Mozart added clarinets to the G Minor Symphony after having heard it played. It happens.'”
So Babbitt asked the orchestra to release the commission back to him, and ultimately offered it to Schuller to perform. Since no-one was interested in funding the project, it was an entirely self-produced enterprise, Schuller hiring with his own money pick-up string players from the Boston area and paying for the 12 rehearsals he was able to finance. The premiere took place on 8 Feburary 1991 and performance was repeated on the next day, each time surrounded by a different program with some of the major 20th Century works for strings: Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night and Miaskovsky’s Sinfonietta on the premiere, Honegger’s second Symphony and Stravinsky’s Concerto in D on the repeat (clever choice, as both works were commissions and premieres by the same Paul Sacher, in 1940 and 1946). Schuller says he lost 42,000 $ on the whole effort. Man, that’s putting your money where your heart is!
The performance of Babbitt then is culled from the two concerts. Schuller makes no bones that this is not a perfect realization of the score. Not that anybody will hear it without the score. He also says that it is “very ‘representative’ of the work, in mood and character, and in all its polyphonic, rhythmic/metric and structural splendor”, and that indeed is the impression it gives. He finally gives this listening advice:
“Since Transfigured Notes is a totally polyphonic and atonal work, with nine individual lines all vying for equal contrapuntal attention, and since, further, Babbitt does not work with ‘melody’ and ‘harmonic accompaniment’ in the traditional sense, it is pointless for the listener to try to ferret out conventional melodies and harmonies, for there are none. As in a gigantic, multi-layered, collective improvisation, the music is best listened to – and appreciated, particularly at a first hearing – in its overall surface totality, rather than trying to follow any individual lines or shapes or gestures. There is also no repetition in Babbits’s music. One must therefore ‘stay with the music’ as it progresses and develops – mostly very rapidly and unpredictably. Since none of what has just been heard is ever repeated, one must follow the music’s course closely from moment to moment, or one is in danger of quickly losing the thread and continuity of the composition. I liken this way of listening to looking at a lake (or an ocean) at a distance, taking in the large macro-picture rather than trying to focus inn on the micro-details of waves and wavelets close by. Just let the music wash over you in its totality, and you might be surprised what rich and totally new listening rewards you will reap.” To which, in a complementary note in the booklet, Babbitt responds: “I am grateful to Gunther for his suggestions for listening to my work, which I never would have dared offer, and which very well may aid me in listening to my own composition”.
But Transfigured Notes isn’t a lake, not even an ocean, it is (if I try to translate into images the aural impressions and emotions produced by my listening) a burning maelstrom of lava. You don’t necessarily understand why it runs the time it runs (nearly 26 minutes) and why it stops when it does, but it doesn’t matter: the music’s exacerbated, screaming lyricism, the incredibly present and potent string tone carry you away indeed. Sure, it is tough music, no “singable” melody, just string lines moving, wriggling, intertwining, vying, but it is as in the “coloristic” music of Ligeti in the 1960s and early 1970s: the impact is physical, it isn’t melody or harmony, it is texture and acoustic properties of sound. On one small point, I think it is exactly the opposite of what Schuller says: because there is no repetition, no clearly unfolding architecture, but much unpredictability, it doesn’t matter if your mind wanders a moment or two from the maelstrom. When you return, the maelstrom is still there. In fact, at various points, I wished that there would have been more “micro-events” in the music’s fabric, bubbles bursting on the surface from apparently nowhere. For all its whirling energy, the music seemed fairly “smooth”, long lines rather than gnarled knots. But that too is a small detail. This is going to be my favorite Babbitt piece, and in fact one of the rare ones I warm up to.
From his two concerts, Schuller selected as complements Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night – an obvious choice, given the punning way Babbitt’s title refers to it (“not intended to suggest explicit musical or (least of all) programmatic dependency or reference, beyond the circumstances that both works are extended (his more than mine) single movement works for strings (…). But it is the later Schoenberg’s musical idea, if not style, which invests – by extension – every dimension of Transfigured Notes”) and the Concerto in D of Stravinsky, also an early influence on Babbitt. Schuller’s comments on Stravinsky’s little String Concerto and its harmonic ambiguity are exceptionally knowledgeable, insightful, and way beyond the musicological capabilities of this reader. Incidentally, the duration of this performance of Schoenberg is very close to that of Babbitt’s piece: 27:49 to 25:53. When there was all the fuss with the Philadelphia Orchestra abandoning it, it was announced as an 18-minute piece. Who knows, maybe Schuller conducts it very slowly, just for the players to get it right? Well, we’ll know only when the next recording comes out, and I doubt that this will happen soon.
Schuller leads a great Transfigured Night. The hall’s very resonant acoustics, while blurring some of the inner voices in the densest moments, contribute to the performance’s awesome power and intensity, giving, as in the Babbitt, huge body to the string textures. The double basses low C is incredible, try it at 13:17. Commendably also, Schuller eschews the languid approach, and while not aiming for the high-strung urgency of Mitropoulos (his 1958 studio recording with the New York Philharmonic, reissued to CD in stupendous sonics, see my review, link will open new tab), he always maintains the underlying flow in the slow sections. It is interesting to note how close his tempos are to Stokowski’s, especially in his first recording from 1952 for RCA (reissued on Guild GHCD 2388/89 barcode 795754238921, paired with Stokowski’s live 1961 Gurrre-Lieder). It is a live concert, there are a few coughs and stage noises.
These same elements however work against Stravinsky’s Concerto in D. Here the very resonant acoustics make the orchestra sound somewhat thick and opaque, which is not what Stravinsky’s neo-classicism requires. But (maybe as a consequence), Schuller is also thick and heavy in his pacing of the piece. Not that it is a problem in itself, and Schuller, while on the slow side in the first movement, is not the most extreme I’ve heard (that’s Colin Davis on Decca Entreprise 425 622-2, barcode 028942562226 with Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Danses concertantes, Cantata). 
But, from a man who, in his famous (or infamous) book “The Compleat Conductor” (ISBN 0195126610), reviled so many colleagues past or present for their general inobservance of the scores, it is funny that Schuller should NOT observe, not so much Stravinsky’s metronome indication (the hall’s resonant acoustics may have been a factor explaining that Schuller took it about 10 beats/minute slower), but Stravinsky’s very strict tempo relationship within the movement. At 2:16, a new section opens, notated “Moderato”, in which Stravinsky instructs for the new binary beat to be the same as the previous ternary beat; like Karajan (on DG “20th Century Classics” 423 252-2 barcode 028942325227 with Symphony in C and Symphony of Pslms, or DG “The Originals” 447 435-2 barcode 028944743524 with Honegger’s Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3 “Liturgique”, see my review, link will open new tab), Schuller takes the new section significantly slower than the relationship would imply, giving it an air of Viennese languor. In the next and explosive section, at 3:54, again like Karajan he goes for weight rather than drive, and there too doesn’t observe the precise tempo relationship, which forces him to imperceptibly but significantly accelerate to return to his opening tempo at 4:56. Not that any of this would truly matter (although the thickness, the relative lack of drive, the excessive languidness, not ideally suited to Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, do matter), and there are nice details that show the care given by Schuller to Stravinsky’s expressive articulation marks (listen to the glissandi at 1:21). But you can’t write “The Compleat Conductor”, then put paid to the score’s carefully conceived architecture and hope not to feel the backlash. Gunther, add him to your list of reviled conductors for the next augmented edition!
To his credit, Schuller takes the two next movements remarkably close to Stravinsky’s metronome indications, which, in the Arioso, is slightly slower than Stravinsky paced it in his two recordings (Stravinsky obviously didn’t insist on strict respect of his score’s tempi – instrumental character and bite were more important). The pacing, added to the resonant acoustic, fills the music with Viennese charm, and with much languor again (and the resonance of the double basses tend to excessively clog the acoustic space). Stravinsky’s more flowing tempo in his two recordings filled it with elegance. Again because of the acoustics, there are touches of heavy-footedness also: just listen to the two impossibly resonant chords at 1:21, it’s like a big lump of butter melting under the hot sun – only Karajan has been that bad. Likewise, with the resonant acoustics the Finale is sonically lush, but played at the score’s tempo it isn’t very propulsive. Stravinsky took it faster. In fact, everybody I’ve heard took it faster than Schuller. Also, because Schuller was slower than the metronome in the first movement, again he disrupts the tempo unity explicitly called for by the composer – both movements share the same metronome beat.
No matter. Stravinsky’s Concerto in D wasn’t the subject here. Tough but impressive Babbitt, great performance of Transfigured Night. I doubt that Schuller ever recouped his expenses on the sales of the CD, but he deserves to.