VIOLA POWER

BY BART DE VRIES

Bruckner’s 9th Symphony represents the end of an era. It is not only the deferred last concert of SOB’s Bruckner cycle (postponed due to Covid) but also, more importantly, it was the composer’s last work, on which he worked up until his deathbed. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to finish it. The fourth and last movement remained incomplete. There have been numerous musicians, conductors and scientists who have made efforts to finalize the symphony, but it is Leopold Nowak’s version that will be performed this month.

While Bruckner was in the process of composing, he may have instinctively felt his time was running out. After having dedicated his 7th Symphony to King Ludwig II of Bavaria and his Eighth to Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, he decided to dedicate his last work to the good Lord, the Majesty of Majesties himself. Superstitiously afraid his 9th Symphony would incur his death (Beethoven looming large), its genesis stretched out for almost a decade. The symphony’s third movement in particular is full of references to Bruckner’s impending demise. The melody in the tubas, for instance, two to three minutes into the movement, is meant as a farewell to life.

As always, also on his Ninth, Bruckner worked in a cyclical way. There are, for example, three versions of the trio, the second part of the second movement. In two of them, the viola has a solo, creating a useful crossover to Anders Hillborg’s brand new Viola Concerto (a co-commission of the SOB) on this month’s program.

Hillborg, this season’s composer in residence, collaborated intensively with the violist Lawrence Power, the soloist in and the dedicatee of the concerto. Power, also a teacher in Zurich, says that the piece is a firework exploding with surprises. It sprouts from Berio’s Sequenze, and embraces several different styles, including pop music. In the middle of the piece, for instance, Hillborg quotes a famous song by the Beatles – a nod to the fact that the concerto was premiered (by Power) in Liverpool by the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the principal commissioner. After the strength and anger of the concerto’s opening, beautiful harmonies follow, which sometimes slide up and down like a synthesizer.

One of Power’s requests to Hillborg (born in Sweden in 1954) was to write a concerto that can be performed for the next twenty years, a modest way of asking for a piece that lasts for eternity. Not an easy task. But based on the audience’s response so far, the composer succeeded gloriously. One of Hillborg’s trademarks is – in Power’s words – that his music has a universal attraction, and is direct and accessible creating a broad appeal. Some may criticize this, but for Power (and for the audience) it has great, and hopefully persisting allure. As Power explained, the viola is an instrument of compromise that developed its personality in the twentieth century. It has a human voice with the potential of a soprano as well as a bass and it is a historic anomaly. Being in between a violin and a cello, it should ‘mathematically’ be bigger, which would make it unfeasible to hold underneath the chin. As a result, the instrument doesn’t have fixed measurements, as the violin has. Power plays a slightly bigger than average Amati viola, which subsequently has a somewhat deeper sound. But as Power says, it depends on the player how the instrument sounds. We can rest assured that the combination of Hillborg, Power and Amati will be a recipe for musical success.