KLUXEN & POULIOT – TCHAIKOVSKY VIOLIN CONCERTO
The general assessment of The Who’s 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia is that it strove for greater complexity, both musically and in terms of its plot, than popular music generally allowed. Filmic in its aspirations, the double LP traced the trials and tribulations of a young fan, Jimmy, who was first caught up in and then let down by ’60s youth culture. It also marked a radical expansion of the band’s sonic palette, featuring state-of-the-art synthesizers, frequent use of field recordings, and multi-tracked horn and string parts contributed by members of the quartet.
For its time, Quadrophenia was both a massive undertaking and a daring manoeuvre, especially in bandleader Pete Townshend’s decision to give Jimmy a four-way split personality, and then assign different aspects of the character’s psyche to the band’s four temperamentally incompatible constituents.
Ambitious? Assuredly. But groundbreaking? Maybe not so much, considering that the Danish composer Carl Nielsen had beaten Townshend to the punch by some 71 years. Nielsen’s Symphony No. 2, from 1902, is also a “quadrophrenic” character study, and the character the composer is studying is essentially his own.
In this work, nicknamed “The Four Temperaments”, Nielsen attempts to do for choler, phlegm, melancholy, and sanguinity what Antonio Vivaldi did for spring, summer, fall, and winter. The composer’s own program notes for a 1931 performance credit a painting—think “dogs playing poker”—that he and some friends had seen in a rural tavern as his initial inspiration. “The Choleric was on horseback. He had a long sword in his hand, which he was wielding fiercely in thin air; his eyes were bulging out of his head, his hair streamed wildly around his face, which was so distorted by rage and diabolical hate that I could not help bursting out laughing,” Nielsen wrote. “The other three pictures were in the same style, and my friends and I were heartily amused by the naïveté of the pictures, their exaggerated expression and their comic earnestness. But how strangely things can sometimes turn out! I, who had laughed aloud and mockingly at these pictures, returned constantly to them in my thoughts.”
This, Victoria Symphony music director Christian Kluxen contends, is because these exaggerated caricatures reflected Nielsen’s own nature back to him.
“Nielsen was a conflicted character, and he was also a very broad character,” Kluxen says of his fellow Dane, noting that today Nielsen would almost certainly have been diagnosed as bipolar. “He came from a rural background and people who knew him said that there were parts of his personality that were very simple, while he was at the same time extremely complicated and artistically educated. In each movement of the Symphony No. 2 you can hear how the main musical character is always somewhat in conflict with its antagonist character, creating conflicts. But the beautiful thing is that the main musical character, in the end, always comes to some kind of rest, mostly through the character’s acceptance of its own authenticity.”
Kluxen sees a parallel with the American composer Missy Mazzoli’s Sinfonia (For Orbiting Spheres), in which ever-shifting loops of sound depict the movements of the planets, as kept in place by gravity. “She doesn’t describe it as music that pictures a solar system, but rather music in the shape of a solar system,” he points out.
Mazzoli herself describes her musical structures as “rococo”, meaning curvilinear and somewhat ornamental. But she has other concerns, too. Listeners may be startled by her use, early on in Sinfonia, of two harmonicas—not played with the artistry of a Larry Adler or a Robert Bonfiglio, but simply for wheezing, hurdy-gurdy-like texture.
“I like the juxtaposition of the non-virtuosic with the virtuosic,” Mazzoli says. “I wanted that sense of ‘Oh, I could play that,’ but in this context that is very refined and constructed—and it’s made by woodwind players who are really virtuosi on their instruments. So I liked putting those two elements next to each other. The thing that draws you in is the vulnerability of the harmonica, and its familiarity—but it’s an event that’s composed in a very planned-out, structured way.”
As with Nielsen’s “Four Temperaments”, there’s a frisson between the humble and the elegant in Sinfonia that is both unusual and deliciously attractive. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, in contrast, is all elegance—and, with Toronto-born violinist Blake Pouliot in the soloist’s role, assured virtuosity.
“It’s here for balance,” Kluxen admits, because sometimes in life you just have to take the smooth with the rough.
Notes by Alex Varty
Christian Kluxen, conductor
