Ionarts-at-Large: Rott World Premiere, Widmann & Martinů with the ORF RSO

There was some great programming going on, on part of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra with Cornelius Meister, last Thursday at the Wiener Konzerthaus. One way you could tell: The place was half empty. Why bother indeed: Only a world premiere by the enigmatic proto-Mahlerian Hans Rott, the Austrian premiere of Jörg Widman’s Violin Concerto with Christian Tetzlaff, and a rarely heard great symphony—Martinů’s Third—to cap it off. If this kind of concert can’t be communicated in such a way to draw a good crowd, there are perhaps dark times ahead for classical music, or classical music marketing… or most likely both. But let’s enjoy it while it lasts, on the willing taxpayer’s expense:

Hans Rott’s Hamlet Overture aims grandly at Shakespeare and succeeds on its own terms—something that Rott himself may not have believed, because he gave up composition after finishing the full sketch and a few pages of orchestration. We can hear for ourselves now, because the 18-year old composer’s work has had its (apparently often cryptic) instructions for instrumentation in the unfinished score turned into a performing version by Johannes Volker Schmidt, which helped it to its world premiere now, 130 years after Hans Rott’s death.

Belated World Premiere

H.Rott, Symphony in E, Orchestral Suite, P.Järvi / Frankfurt RSO RCA

Although it’s a much simpler work than the vast Symphony that helped Rott to late and belated fame, it’s a charmer. It opens with a brass chorale over timpani—half Bruckner, half Gabrieli—before the sumptuous strings set in that took the work much closer to the romantic realm that one would expect. Still, the neo-baroque elements persist faintly, and they were especially well played by the brass before later flubs slight marred the picture towards the: this-is-the-piece-we-couldn’t-spend-much-time-in-rehearsal-on status… But all the same it was a committed and sympathetic performance, better than that of the considerably more challenging and ambitious Rott Symphony by the same forces at the 2011 Salzburg Festival in any case. As is usual—because we cannot grant Rott his own voice on grounds of our own unfamiliarity with his limited canon of works (much less mature ones), the need to compare his music to others prevails: Wagner here, Liszt there, and Herzogenberg, perhaps. Issue on CD much hoped for… especially since the ORF recorded and broadcast the performance, anyway.

Onward from highlight to highlight: Jörg Widman’s Violin Concerto is a

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Dip Your Ears, No. 149 (Hans Rott Returns)

H.Rott, Symphony in E, Suite for Orchestra in B-flat, P.Järvi / Frankfurt RSO RCA

Rott’s Return

Finally a label – RCA – has agreed to release the Frankfurt RSO and Paavo Järvi’s 2010 performance of Hans Rott’s grand Symphony. The story of composer and work (see Listen Winter 11) is as fascinating as the ebullient music. Paavo Järvi has channeled his enthusiasm for the youthful Wagnerian-Brucknerian-proto-Mahlerian symphony into a stupendous performance, still mindful of its weaknesses (tonal balance, triangle-excesses) to avoid these possible pitfalls. The fact that he couples the Symphony with a Hans Rott world premiere recording of the unfinished, re-constructed first Orchestral Suite makes this release only more exciting for lovers of over-the-top romantic orchestral works. Excerpt of Paavo Järvi talking about the Symphony here. Review of the concert at which this was (largely) recorded here.

Made possible by Listen Music Magazine.

Rott'n'Roll: Notes from the 2011 Salzburg Festival ( 14 )

Guest Orchestra • ORF RSO Vienna

With Berg on the program (ditto Webern or Schoenberg), ticket sales recede noticeably, predictably. In Salzburg just as anywhere else. When the composer/work that is coupled with Berg (in this case the Violin Concerto) is so completely unknown to audiences as Hans Rott’s Symphony in E, then it is almost surprising to find the Felsenreitschule (1400 seats) at about 95% capacity with only a few lacunae among the seats and “Looking for [cheap] Ticket” signs before its doors, roughly in balance with the “[expensive] Ticket to sell” signs. Reason to stay away for some, reason to attend for others; for me the combination of Rott and Berg spelled out a great concert! Unfortunately it didn’t guarantee a great performance.

HRott, Sy. no.1, S.Weigle / Munich RSO Arte Nova A.Berg, Violin Concerto, A.Steinbacher / A.Nelsons / WDR SO Orfeo

The ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by its young (1980-born) Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Cornelius Meister (also Music Director of the Heidelberg Philharmonic and Opera), performed Berg’s Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja first. He started out with a warm and romantic, confident opening – Kopatchinskaja with a rough, darkly hollow tone in tow. Joyously swaying and bopping along the rhythms, she never descended to pianissimo and or gave that silvery-ethereal tone to the concerto that it is often endowed with. Whether it was that or not, something was missing from the performance; after the notably earthy, terrific start it petered out and offered two movements of well-intentioned tedium.

Hans Rott’s Symphony comes with a great story about which I have written before (for WETA’s now defunct column, and in an upcoming issue of LISTEN Magazine). It’s a grand work, not a great one. It’s flawed, but comprises an absolutely loveable smorgasbord of ideas, and most of them beautifully welded together. If romantic music is up your ally, and a hint of naïve pomposity doesn’t scare you, Hans Rott’s symphony is one you must hear. There are lots of Wagnerian bits, there’s some Schumann, here we go Bruckner, and whoa, Brahms! No wonder the already famous composer wasn’t amused when Rott showed him the audacious work: Rather than being flattered to find himself musically united in a work with these other composers, Brahms probably perceived the final movement of Rott’s symphony—with its more than explicit reference to the finale of his First—as making fun of him.

The ambitious but short (8 minutes, “Alla breve”) first movement, announced with an exposed trumpet solo, received (rightly) spontaneous applause which was of course quickly quelled by the Vigilant Applause Police. It nearly brought tears to my eyes when I imagined how Hans Rott, who—distraught, impoverished, confused—committed suicide at age 26, might have responded to such expression of public approval for his work. The ORF RSO, which recorded the Symphony on the cpo label under Dennis Russell Davis a decade ago, added a terrifically moving Adagio, even as the strings where still clumsy under Meister’s ambiguous, erratically waving direction. The triangle, popping up in some 600 (out of 1500) bars, was only partly reigned in, which added an occasional element of stuck doorbell. The expansive Scherzo and “Very slow – Lively” finale didn’t appear well rehearsed, but no sloppiness could steal the thunder of Hans Rott entirely, helping the composer, if not the performers, to a considerable success. Certainly not a great performance, but still almost a great concert.

Ionarts-at-Large: Paavo Järvi Excites with Rott, Pahud Bores with Mozart

W.A.Mozart, Flute Concertos 1 & 2, Cto. for Flute & Harp, E.Pahud / C.Abbado / BPh EMI Hans Rott, Sy. No.1 + Orchestral Prelude, Julius Caesar Overture, Sebastian Weigle / Munich RSO Arte Nova

Mozart: “Abduction from the Seraglio” Overture, Flute Concerto in G, KV 313 / Rott: Symphony in E. Emmanuel Pahud (flute), Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Järvi (conductor), Old Opera House, Frankfurt 15/16.04.2010 (jfl)


A little decoagulation-Overture to warm up with—from Mozart’s “Abduction from the Seraglio” (with J.A.André’s ending for in-concert use)—and then the populist draw of the evening: A Mozart Flute Concerto (KV 313) with Emanuel Pahud. The work posits this question: Is it possible to write about Mozart flute concertos and not mention that Mozart hated the flute?

Emmanuel Pahud’s tone—dry, airless, with superbly enunciated notes and a touch of Purell—awed duly, but the concerto didn’t rise above routined excellence. To be more to the point: even the surprise squeaks from the horns didn’t make this self-satisfied performance any less boring. But why waste time with the stuffing when there was a glorious Turkey to be heard: Hans Rott’s first and only symphony, and the reason I had traveled to Frankfurt in the first place.

I don’t remember how I first came across this Symphony in E, but it was at a time when I was already receptive for Rott’s mix of Wagner, Bruckner, and—so I would have thought—Mahler. It turns out that the 19 year old composer’s audacious work, though heavily indebted to the first two composers as well as Brahms and Schumann, didn’t copy anything from Mahler. Mahler copied from Rott, his fellow student-colleague. “In today’s world”, Paavo Järvi said to me earlier, “Mahler would be sued for plagiarism.” (See interview on WETA.) Complete phrases, the treatment of the chorales—they are all there in Mahler’s Second Symphony or the opening of the First Symphony’s second movement. “You’ve got the Scherzo: daa Bum, baa Bum-da-dam, bum-da-da-da-dam… I mean, really!” Järvi is almost amused at the chutzpah Mahler displayed in lifting ideas from Rott.

Now, in concert, it is easy to be amazed, impressed, and flabbergasted by the work. Rott is all too quick to pull out all the registers at once, like a young man freshly infatuated with the organ and drunk on his own sound. And with the many, prolonged climaxes, there comes the triangle. And once it comes, it never leaves. It’s as if Rott had forgotten how to switch off the triangle machine. A cause for in-concert merriment, but not necessarily a highlight of the symphony, except for the triangle player who finally has to put in his salary’s worth in effort. The sudden pizzicato waltz scene, followed immediately by a wildly crashing orchestral romp, is another one of those moves later associated with Mahler.

Calling the work the missing link between Bruckner and Mahler might be going too far, though—there simply isn’t enough of the humble repose of Bruckner yet; Rott is too much a boy getting excited in the orchestra shop. And as things go under way, he seems to yell to the musicians: You get a solo. And you get a solo. And you get a solo. Everybody gets a solo. Add the false endings (errant applause is almost guaranteed before the Fugue of the finale) and the Wagner piled upon Brahms piled upon Aida-esque grandiosity, and you have a positively ludicrous orchestral fun-house with a built-in ‘name that quote’ game. Impossible not to love!

If the recording sessions earlier that morning went a little better than the performance in the evening—the trumpet opening wasn’t terribly secure and the balance was a little awkward in the first movement and the strings initially stiff—then the ultimately hair-raising, over-the-top performance of the Frankfurt (actually: Hesse) Radio Symphony Orchestra should be a front runner among the Rott recordings, surpassing even the current top-dog, Sebastian Weigle with the Munich Radio Symphony Orchestra on Arte Nova.

Paavo Järvi on Hans Rott

Hans Rott, Sy. No.1 + Orch.Prelude, Julius Caesar Ovt., Sebastian Weigle / Munich RSO Arte Nova (Best available recording so far)

For over two years, ever since reading Frederick Pollack’s poem on him, I wanted to publish something on the composer Hans Rott to make good use of the poem set in context. A recent trip to Frankfurt to hear Paavo Järvi conduct (and record) the Rott’s Symphony in E has finally given me the proper excuse to do so, over on WETA, later tomorrow: http://www.weta.org/fmblog/?p=1938. Here's some of what Järvi has to say about Rott: