Erich Korngold

Briefly, I should mention that I attended a concert by the Seattle Symphony on Saturday, featuring a stirring performance of the well-known Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5.  Perhaps to offset the Russian flavor of this offering, the night's performance was dedicated to the "brave people of Ukraine," and the yellow and blue colors of the Ukraine flag were projected on the stage's surrounding walls.

The performance was guest conducted by Joshua Weilerstein, the youthful artistic director of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, who introduced each piece with a brief talk.  His short lectures were well-presented, and helpful.  His leadership of the orchestra was unusually dynamic, even acrobatic, and the orchestra seemed to respond with vigor.

In response to enthusiastic applause, the orchestra ended the evening with a short musical encore by a Ukrainian composer.

More exciting than the Tchaikovsky, perhaps, was a performance of Erich Korngold's Violin Concerto in D major, immediately before intermission.  The violinist was James Ehnes, who has performed as a guest violinist to great acclaim with orchestras worldwide, and is especially well known in Seattle as artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Society.

Korngold composed a ballet at age eleven that took Europe by storm (Der Schneemann), and followed up with a piano sonata at the age of 13, a sonata that was played across Europe by Artur Schnabel..  He is one of history's great child prodigies, but his classical career in Vienna was cut short in 1934 by the rise of Nazism.  Because he was Jewish, Korngold immigrated to America, and accepted an offer to write screen music for Hollywood.  He wrote the scores for 16 Hollywood films, but vowed to compose no more classical works until Hitler was driven from power.

His violin concerto, composed in 1945, was Korngold's attempt to return to classical music after the fall of Germany.  It is a fairly short work, 24 minutes in Saturday's performance, arranged in the traditional three movements.  The music is stirring, and displays themes from a number of the Hollywood scores he had composed earlier.    

According to the program notes, Korngold's attempt to return to classical compositions was not successful with the critics, and for many years his reputation remained that of a Hollywood composer of film scores.  Since 1970, however, again according to the program notes, and after his death in 1957, his compositions have received increased critical appreciation.

The Korngold concerto received an enormous standing ovation from Saturday night's audience, but the applause was probably directed more toward Ehnes's impressive violin technique and musicality, than to the composition itself. 

Ehnes responded to the applause with a short solo encore by Paganini.