In their contrasts, Franz Schubert and Alban Berg make a complementary pair. Both composers were, in very different ways, intrinsically Viennese and each man died young -- Schubert, most tragically, at 31. Schubert's genius added harmonic complexity and metaphysical angst to Biedermeier-era complacency. Berg's lyricism and emotional depth put a human face on the chilly serialism of the Second Viennese School.
Michael Tilson Thomas's smart, quirky programming combined works of both men for a bracing weekend Viennese festival by the New World Symphony. Friday night's opening event at the Lincoln Theatre set the tone with Berg's Lyric Suite and Schubert's Mass in E flat.
Berg remains the most passionate and directly communicative of the 12-tone school's early triumvirate (Schoenberg and Webern, being the other two). His Lyric Suite was born of an impassioned but apparently unconsummated love for a married woman.
Though written in 1928, Berg's Lyric Suite breathes an atmosphere of findesíecle Viennese decadence, the world of Gustav Klimt and Thomas Mann. The romantic inspiration is clear with its Tristan quotation but Berg deftly creates a kind of wrong-note Mahler, fusing subdued tragedy and emotional intensity within serial strictures.
The sense of romantic yearning and dark foreboding was clearly palpable in Friday's performance under Tilson Thomas. The burnished strings brought out the angular music of the opening movement as much as the mystery and elliptical strangeness of the multi-divided strings in the central movement and the dark-hued somber valedictory of the final section.
Schubert's sixth and final mass, written just four months before his early death is hardly a consolatory work with its malign trombones and terror as present as religious solace.
Mounting the complex 52-minute Mass in E flat in the voice-bleaching Lincoln Theatre is an ambitious undertaking, but Friday's performance provided a largely persuasive account. Seraphic Fire members offered worthy solo voices and the hybrid choir of Seraphic Fire and the University of Miami Frost Chorale produced solid, well-projected results, though the acoustic provided little color or bloom to the voices.
Tilson Thomas' direction firmly brought out the drama and bleak, existential dread of the Agnus Dei, with brisk tempos for the fugal sections of the Sanctus, and hard-edged timpani attacks. Less present were the music's radiance and spiritual qualities, which felt slighted in favor of the fire and brimstone.
By Sunday's closing program, there were some fitful signs of battle fatigue but the playing remained largely impressive.
Berg's suite from Lulu, his final opera, offers a 35-minute chunk of this remarkable score, which tells of the title temptress who destroys the lives of three men before she herself is murdered. MTT led a brilliant account of this restless surging music, bringing out the communicative essence of Berg's quasi-tonal serial style.
Like all singers, Rinnat Moriah had to battle the room, and her voice probably has more body than the audience actually heard. The beautiful Israeli soprano would be a terrific Lulu on stage and her pure, flexible voice had no trouble with the stratospheric challenges of the brief vocal excerpts.
Schubert's Great Symphony in C Major is a Tilson Thomas party piece and Sunday's performance showed the conductor's ability to lift the rhythms with dynamic vigor, detailing the music while keeping the architecture of this vast canvas in balance.
Some haste was apparent in the fitfully raucous textures with woodwind blending scrappily in the trio of the Scherzo. Rick Basehore's oboe playing was a constant delight, however, and this was a lively reading having both weight and infectious, youthful vitality.
