THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 16, 2020 91
than anything in the African-American
tradition. Salonen and the L.A. Phil wal-
lowed in the welter of sound while keep-
ing the humor intact, so that the work
seemed primarily to be a joke on itself.
Weill, by contrast, was first encoun-
tered in a sober-minded mode—that of
the severe young composer who had
studied with Ferruccio Busoni and idol-
ized Arnold Schoenberg. Weill’s Con-
certo for Violin and Wind Orchestra,
composed in 1924, is an exercise in reti-
cence and ambiguity, shorn of Roman-
tic excess and virtuoso display. Anticipating
works that Shostakovich would write
years later, it alternates between mean-
dering, brooding episodes and outbreaks
of bristling energy; at one point, the en-
semble is reduced to a grotesque trio of
xylophone and two double-basses. The
challenge in such a score is to establish
direction where conventional narrative
patterns are absent. Carolin Widmann,
the soloist, found her own tensely ex-
pressive thread in the labyrinth. Salonen
elicited eerily beautiful sonorities from
Weill’s strange orchestration—for exam-
ple, a slow-motion, proto-minimalist
shimmer of winds in the third movement.
Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” Sym-
phony (1934), which followed after inter-
mission, is derived from his opera of the
same title—a portrait of the German Re-
naissance painter Matthias Grünewald
and his quest to root himself in the “pri-
mal soil” of the people. Such a patriotic
subject ought to have found favor in Nazi
Germany, but Hitler had taken a dislike
to the composer’s music, and perfor-
mances of “Mathis” were not permitted.
In opera and symphony alike, the brat-
tiness of the enfant terrible gives way to
clean-lined monumentality, with plan-
gent choirs of brass reminiscent of the
symphonic climaxes of Anton Bruckner.
In some respects, “Mathis” is a curious
choice for a Weimar festival, since the
piece stems from the early Nazi period.
But it partakes of the same urbane reli-
giosity that marks certain creations of the
Bauhaus movement: Lyonel Feininger’s
woodcut “Cathedral” appeared on the
cover of Walter Gropius’s manifesto of
- Salonen, in his interpretation,
deëmphasized the symphony’s Germanic
context and gave it a modern sheen. The
L.A. Phil offered up a sound that seemed
to glow from within, drawing power from
the deep roots of Western tradition rather
than from the political distortions to
which that tradition has been subjected.
Salonen’s second program jumped into
the anarchy of Weimar music theatre.
The British actor-director Simon Mc-
Burney and his brother, the composer-
scholar Gerard McBurney, devised a
program, entitled “Nightfall,” with a
brink-of-disaster theme. First came
Hindemith’s youthful, brutalist one-act
opera “Murderer, Hope of Women” (1919),
which is based on a gruesome Expres-
sionistic text by Oskar Kokoschka. The
score begins with horns and trombones
blaring a semitone dissonance, like a
motor horn in a nightmare city, and goes
on from there. That garish spectacle faded
before the austere nobility of Weill’s “Ber-
liner Requiem” (1928), a choral cantata
on poems by Bertolt Brecht. The memo-
rialized figures include the murdered
Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg, an
unknown soldier of the First World War,
and a young woman who has died by sui-
cide. Lastly came the short ballet-opera
“The Seven Deadly Sins,” which Weill
and Brecht created in the first part of
1933, soon after becoming exiles. The text
is a fantastical American travelogue, with
scenes set in Memphis, Los Angeles, and
Boston; Weill’s songwriting is sinuous
and sardonic in the “Threepenny” manner.
The agile players of the L.A. Phil
handled the rapid changes of style with
ease, as did an accomplished group of
singers, including Nora Fischer, Made-
leine Bradbury Rance, Christopher
Purves, and members of the L.A. Mas-
ter Chorale. The disappointment was
the McBurneys’ production, which sel-
dom rose above standard-issue Weimar
iconography. Brecht insisted that histor-
ical settings should be used to comment
on the present day, and he would have
expected any revival of these pieces to
illuminate the darker currents of Amer-
ican and European politics, none of which
would have surprised him. Instead, we
saw vintage film, photographs, and cos-
tumes, including an old-fashioned Hol-
lywood movie shoot. The only real burst
of political energy came during the in-
termission of the first concert, when
members of the activist group Refuse
Fascism unfurled an anti-Trump banner
in seats behind the orchestra. The ges-
ture received a round of applause from
the audience, but it would have been
good to see the same fury onstage. chiltons.com 866-883-3366Traditional Craftsmanship.
Modern Design.A Chilton original,
available in
16 Knoll fabric
colors.Introducing
the Nautilus
Lounge Chair.Luxuriously soft. Woven to last a lifetime.
4 pillowcases with every queen and king set15% off code
NewYorker15AmericanBlossomLinens.com 888-825-0110COTTON BEDDING
Made in the USA: Grown to Sewn100% organicP.O. Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331
800 -222 -1236 781-934 -2454
http://www.fcwl.comSublime...30% savings on select
July and August 2020 departures
* New reservations only; other restrictions apply