Last night’s concert, “Music of Destiny,” ended the first week of the 73rd Carmel Bach Festival. For this week’s audience, it was Maestro Bruno Weill’s final concert of the Festival. As a”Swan Song,” so to speak (or by any standard, for that matter), Bruno Weill is departing in a blaze of glory. The concluding work on the program, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, was full of sound and fury, with an especially gorgeous slow movement and a knock-em-dead finale that brought the audience to its feet with a storm of tumultuous applause and lots of bravos! It is one of the most familiar symphonies ever written, however, during this concert the Festival Orchestra gave us a strong and vital performance that kept us totally involved from its first to its last stormy notes.
The initial four-note motif at the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, in the popular mind often perceived as “Fate Knocking at the Door,” (and as a powerful symbol of resistance of “V for Victory” during World War II), emerged as a powerful, but subdued subliminal heartbeat in the timpani in the second work on the program, Brahms’ Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny). Brahms life was beset with many unfulfilled ambitions, and, although he wrote several works expressing the deep fulfillment of love, his own life was plagued with a series of romantic misadventures. Understandably, his mature music, and he matured early on, contains an autumnal sadness hinting of things left undone, and sentiments left unspoken. Maestro Weill plumbed the depths of this powerful work and achieved some magical moments, one of the most memorable was the hushed pianissimo chorus against the text “to emerge with clarity” (I am misquoting, unfortunately, because the singing was so beautiful it kept distracting me from the excellent supertitles).
Again, as in previous choral works heard during the Festival, the excellent performance by the Festival Chorale and the Festival Chorus owes much to Associate Conductor Andrew Megill and Assistant Conductor John Koza. Getting the best out of such a large choral group ― precise diction, rhythmic precision and control of a wide range of dynamics in the shaping of phrases ― all requires much rehearsal time and a lot of effort and commitment, and it’s a lot harder than it looks.
The opening work on the evening’s program was Haydn’s Symphony No. 22 in E-flat Major “The Philosopher,” and its outer movements made a powerful impression. The unusual opening movement, marked “Adagio,” led me to expect that the dialogue between English horns and French horns over the persistent staccato bass line would be slow and plodding, as in Bach’s Chorale Prelude, Nun Komm’ der heiden Heiland, although it turned out that Maestro Weil gave it a brisk walking pace that was more charming than lugubrious. The Presto Finale was a knockout of glorious virtuoso playing from the orchestra (great horn playing, especially).
So we bid a grateful goodbye to Bruno Weil. His tenure here was long, and he definitely left his mark.
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