Korngold's Symphony

 My price for not going to New York this weekend to see the Berlin Philharmonic was to miss all the cultural events in Baltimore/DC as well - and the weeks before Thanksgiving are inevitably the prime of the season. This weekend I missed Elektra at the Washington National Opera, and Augustin Hadelich doing Shostakovich's 1st violin concerto at the Baltimore Symphony.

In the meantime, as much as Mahler 7, I'd have been jazzed to hear Korngold's Symphony. One of Kirill Petrenko's best services is that he is reintroducing all those modern classics premiered in Berlin and Vienna between the two world wars: Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schrecker, etc.

When hearing Korngold as a child, Gustav Mahler proclaimed him a genius. Perhaps we shouldn't feel deprived of his concert work. Perhaps it took a genius to invent the language of film music as he basically did, but it's nevertheless sad that we're deprived of so many concert pieces while most of the film music is neither accompanied by great films or fits particularly snuggly in a concert program. Perhaps Korngold's greatest contribution is the great film music inspired by him. Every film buff owes Korngold nearly as much as we do to Hitchcock and Welles (and ultimately more than we do to Bernard Herrmann).

But there are a few pieces that show us properly the spark of that genius. This is a symphony not like any other, mixing Brahms and jazz. That alone should make you curious, but it's more than just that. It's the musical language of an alternate 20th century timeline, a German Gershwin, in which the world of Strauss and Mahler got to evolve alongside popular music. The music of Jewish refugees and victims needs to be heard, not just for moral reasons, but because there is not any music in the world that sounds like Korngold, Weinberg, Schullhoff, Haas, Ullmann, Weiner, Achron, Gal, Milhaud, Dessau, Ornstein, Wellesz, Bloch, Tal, Ben-Haim, Toch, Braunfels, Weinberger, Castelnuovo-Tedesco.... And of course Kurt Weill who's the only one we hear regularly...

And they all sound different from each other. This is the one moment in European history when Jews were truly free on European soil to express themselves before genocide came their way and put a silence to a large Jewish presence in Europe as something other than a hypothetical. In the aftermath of Mahler, there was no moment in European cultural history like this, nor can there be for the forseeable future. Here in America, one cannot help a foreboding that we may be experiencing a moment like that for some of our minority siblings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWgbT6Vhlq8