LAPO

It should have been better. Of all the cultural events around town relating to
the County Museum’s “Degenerate Art” show, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s
concert on Thursday night (repeated tonight) turned out to be one of the more
paltry components.
Why? The programming itself was part of the problem; it seemed lazily
conceived. To be sure, the four composers represented — Ernst Krenek, Erich
Korngold, Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith — figured prominently on the Nazis’
undesirables list. But the music chosen to represent these composers, with one
exception, was only distantly related to the qualities the Nazis had found
repugnant.
Why, for example, represent Krenek with the “Symphonic Elegy” composed in
1946, long after the composer had emigrated to the U.S.? It was a far different
brand of music, exemplified by the jazz rhythms in the opera “Jonny spielt
auf” and the subversive overtones in the twelve-tone “Charles V,” that had
gotten Krenek proscribed; why hadn’t some of this been played instead? There is
beautiful music in this Elegy (composed as a memorial to Anton Webern but
actually full of motives that evoke memories of another Schoenberg disciple,
Alban Berg). It did not, however, serve its purpose.
It would be hard to discern any purpose served by the Korngold Violin Concerto
— composed in 1945 and, thus, another after-the-fact work. A patched-together
gathering of motives from several of Korngold’s vintage movie scores, the work
is lathered over with a slick and sudsy violin line. Korngold designed the work
for Jascha Heifetz but actually produced a virtual parody of that peerless
virtuoso’s more superficial mannerisms. This is as close to a totally worthless
piece as the repertory contains, not so much “degenerate” as depraved.
Hindemith’s well-known symphony built out of the opera “Mathis der Maler”
seemed a particularly lazy choice, considering the fund of unduly neglected
works by this composer — the sharp-edged, acidulous set of chamber concertos
from the 1920s, just for starters — that far more clearly epitomize what the
Nazi cultural dogma found objectionable. This would have been the perfect
occasion to bring some of this wonderful music down off the shelf, but no.
That left only Kurt Weill’s flavorsome “Threepenny Music,” jaunty
arrangements for wind band from the 1928 opera made at the request of Otto
Klemperer. But here, as with everything else on the program, the utterly
dreary, anti-rhythmic time-beating of conductor Lawrence Foster set everything
into a pall. Such lively music, such lifeless playing, and such faulty
intonation from a performing ensemble that seemed not to have been made to care
about the week’s assignment. Sidney Weiss, the Philharmonic’s concertmaster,
skated admirably across the glassy surface of the Korngold Concerto, but to
little avail.
The evening promised much, but delivered little. The tone was somehow reflected
in the “Degenerate Music” exhibition that fills two lobby levels in the hall.
It is a compelling display of valuable material about the Nazis’ marauding
music policies, but riddled with typos including, on one board, three
misspelled names in one paragraph. Management promises to correct these errors.
The concert itself, however, was beyond correction.