While the New York Philharmonic wraps up its Asian Horizons Tour, Avery Fisher is playing host to the London Symphony Orchestra led by Bernard Haitink. On Wednesday evening, the orchestra performed the first of two programs that pair symphonic works by Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler.  Contrasting these composers’ early symphonic styles seemed to be the order of business. However, it was hard to see how the works chosen for the program complimented each other.

Schubert was all of 19 years old when he composed his Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major. It is an eminently tuneful and balanced work that strikes equilibrium between form and material. It is also surprisingly modest in its instrumentation (it was written for a small community orchestra) and a piece that the composer viewed as an exercise towards learning how to write more sophisticated symphonic music.

Compared to the Schubert, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in G major is gargantuan. However, for Mahler, who was 40 at the time of the work’s completion, it was something of a step back from the harrowing dimensions of the second and third symphonies. If Schubert was trying to expand the sonic dimensions of his work, Mahler was consciously pairing down from scaling the heights in the second and third symphonies. Compared to those works (and indeed all of Mahler’s symphonies) the Fourth seems surprisingly modest.

In the Schubert, Haitink elicited a smooth and well-balanced reading from the LSO musicians. The first movement began at a steady gallop, and maintained a moderate, even tempo. Amid clear, open textures, Haitink infused every reiteration of the theme with a different character.  He drew a warm sound from the plaintive horns in the Andante and the unison strings, playing with judicious vibrato, took on a sort of organic swelling quality. The finale was where Haitink’s tightly controlled performance allowed for the most dynamic fluctuations and muscular playing. Adding to the overall sense of drama was a prominent horn ostinato that was never too insistent.

Mahler’s Fourth is a piece that Haitink has recorded no less that four times. On Wednesday night, however, the conductor pushed the boundaries of how much transparency to allow the composer’s intricate orchestrations. Especially during the first movement, the winds and French horns played with heightened effect, often on par with the ebbing melodies carried by the violins. This caused problems by drowning out some of the first violin’s solos. Otherwise, the diaphanous texture that Haitink achieved was fascinating. One sensed a methodical approach tempered by emotional investment. For that reason, the performance never became a clinical dissection à la Boulez. Crescendos and other climactic moments erupted with surprising vigor and violence. But Haitink usually pulled in the reins tightly and efficiently. He also mostly eschewed rubato, even having the trumpets pay slavish devotion to the beat.

In the second movement, the virtuosic scordatura violin of concertmaster Gordan Nikolitch was routinely overpowered by brass. There was a rugged quality to the sinewy bass clarinet line. The echo of the Wunderhorn tune ‘Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld” had a lustrous and otherworldly sheen, though the whole movement sounded a bit too trim and manicured.

The sublime adagio, which I clocked at 22 minutes, was the fulcrum of this performance. Haitink’s equipoise and restraint resulted in an effective reading that never sounded maudlin. One miraculous moment: when the violins leap up a sixth and the gates of heaven open, the shimmering orchestra attained a transcendent quality. In a highly polished performance, this climax was at once noble and elemental.

The final movement enlisted the talents of Swedish soprano Miah Persson (who is currently appearing as Sophie in the Met’s revival of Rosenkavalier) whose “Himmliche Leben” was affecting pure and honest. Her voice that was clear in all registers and capable of great dramatic expression. Here, Haitink might have better reined in the musicians, especially after the mischievous ritornello with its bells and shrill winds.

These worthy performances should pique interest in Friday night’s LSO concert, which will pair Schubert’s Eighth Symphony with Das Lied von der Erde. Haitink will hopefully have an easier time drawing fruitful connections between these late-period works.

Magyar Madness!

A Sunday afternoon concert presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center packed Alice Tully Hall with a program of old and new music with a distinctly – and sometimes not so distinctly – Hungarian whiff that illustrated the pitfalls of overly varied programming.

It was an ambitious if lopsided program that buried Bartok’s challenging String Quartet no. 3 between works by Brahms and Erno Dohnányi and, in the second half featured the New York premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Magyar Madness,” a 35-minute work for string quartet and clarinet that the staunchly tonal composer wrote in 2006 for the clarinetist David Krakauer and the Orion String Quartet. The hard working Orion players are vigorous champions of new music, and formed the backbone of Sunday’s concert.

Pianists Alessio Bax and Annie-Marie McDermott kicked-off the concert with animated, frisky and sometimes seductive four-hand arrangements of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances nos. 6, 10 and 5. McDermott and Bax treated the dissonant sonorities with a breezy, fanciful way and with jarring attacks that were quirky and amusingly off-kilter.

Plopped in the middle of the concert’s first half was Bartok’s highly compressed Third String Quartet. The Orion String Quartet began with a sinewy, shrill and at times ghoulish sound with forceful attacks from the violins. A feeling of uneasy calm was established and preserved until the announcement of the dance-like melodies in the second movement. Here the musicians played with clear textures and rendered the composer’s instrumental techniques with overt care: the con legno rattling of bones and evenly-deployed pizzicato. In all, it sounded a bit antiseptic and unvaried. While the work sounded fluid in their hands, this was a tightly reined-in performance whose emotional content sounded stifled.

The final piece before intermission, Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet no. 2, seemed like a programming misstep. The lush neo-romanticism of Dohnányi’s shimmering work inhabits a different sonic universe from Bartok, this music that sighs and dances around so wistfully. While the rediscovery of lesser-known works is commendable, the quintet’s inclusion on this program detracted greatly from the power of the Bartok.

The concert again shifted gears for in the second half, which was dominated by Del Tredici’s energetic and tuneful “Magyar Madness” - a title that echoes clarinetist Krakauer’s own well-known ensemble “Klezmer Madness!”

If the Orion players were feeling fatigued, they certainly didn’t show it. In the first movement, Krakauer was in control amid the frantic swirling of the strings as he played a modulating series of sequences and plaintively sustained tones in music whose stylistic variety often sounded like mere pastiche. The fractal scales and shifting accents seemed little more than exercises.

The string writing often had a transparent texture, with some unexpected gestures like an intriguingly slow-motion flurry of pizzicato. Krakauer didn’t have much to do until the 20-minute-long finale, which began with a virtuosic rising scale that brought to mind the famous opening to Rhapsody in Blue and which was mirrored later in the movement by an equally precipitous descent. Throughout, Krakauer and the Orion players were kept equally busy with scales and arpeggios in a furious, chase-like music that competed with a tuneful Hungarian-style rondo that was nearly bludgeoned to death by repetition. The old-world melody was less convincing than the anguished klezmer-like high notes the Krakauer landed. And it was these wailing tones that rang truest, even if they seemed out of place for a wide-ranging piece that never fully explored its melodic material and rarely seemed more than an exercise in style.

It felt like a very long late afternoon for an audience that was edified through popular and challenging repertory standards, a rediscovered work and a premiere – and for a concert that struggled to be more than the sum of its parts.

The Swedish Academy announced the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday morning at 7 a.m. ET. This year’s winner is the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller.

In awarding the prize, the Academy called Ms. Müller an author “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”

This is the second consecutive year, the Academy has bestow the award on an author virtually unknown outside of his country. Last year’s winner was the French author and essayist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. At the time of the award’s announcement, Le Clézio had one book translated into English. By way of contrast, Müller has four novels available in English, “Traveling on One Leg,” “Passport,” “The Land of Green Plums,” and “The Appointment,” and one short story collection, “Nadirs.”

Müller is also the second German-speaking female author to win in recent memory. The 2004 literature prize went to controversial Austrian author Elfriede Jelenik, best known for her novel “The Piano Teacher” (“Die Klavierspielerin”).

In recent weeks, rumors were circulating that Müller was on the short list for the prize along with prolific Amos Oz, who would have become the first Israeli to win that distinction, or the American novelists Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. An American author has not one the prize in the past 16 years. The last American recipient was Toni Morrison, who won in 1993.

The Nobel Prizes are considered highly political, which may explain why authors from America and Israel - two countries whose policies are often roundly criticized in Europe - have been denied the prize in recent years.

Here’s a biography of Müller from the Dickinson College website:

“Müller is a highly prolific novelist and essayist whose works portray the human destruction of the Romanian dictatorship and the rootlessness of the political exile.
She was born in August 1953 in the German-speaking village of Nitzkydorf, in the Banat district of Romania. She left her village to study German and Romanian literature at the University of Timisoara. Here she became part of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of idealistic Romanian-German writers seeking freedom of expression under the Ceaucescu dictatorship. After completing her studies she was employed as a translator in a machine factory, until she was fired for refusing to cooperate with the secret police. During this time she wrote the short stories that make up the collection Niederungen, but she had difficulty satisfying the censors, and this work was not published until 1982, and then in radically modified form. Niederungen was followed two years later by Drückender Tango.
In these two works Müller depicted the hypocrisy of village life and its ruthless oppression of nonconformists. She portrayed the zealously fascist mentality of the German minority, its intolerance and corruption. Not surprisingly, she was sharply criticized at home for destroying the idyllic image of German rural life in Romania.
Müller was working as a teacher when her uncensored manuscript of Niederungen was smuggled to the west and published by the Rotbuch Verlag to instant critical acclaim. After a trip to the Frankfurt book fair, where she spoke out publicly against the Romanian dictatorship, she was forbidden to publish in Romania. She continued to write, however, even as her situation in Romania became more and more intolerable. In 1987 she emigrated to the West with her husband, Richard Wagner. Since then, she has been living in Berlin.
Many of Müller’s works reflect aspects of her own history. Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (1986) chronicles the efforts of a Romanian-German peasant family to get passports to leave the country. Like her earlier works, this tale exposes the brutal corruption of the village by showing how its officials, from postmaster to priest, demanded ever more material and sexual favors from those petitioning to leave the country. It, like the collection Barfüßiger Februar (1987), was written while Müller was waiting for permission to emigrate to the west.
Reisende auf einem Bein (1989) portrays the problems of resettlement in the west, and the feelings of alienation that plague the political exile. Many of the essays in Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett (1992) are reflections on political events, written from the perspective of a woman reluctant to lay claim to words such as “homeland.” A second volume of essays, Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel (1991) includes a series of lectures on “Gedanken zum Schreiben” that Müller held at the University of Paderborn in 1989-1990. It is an indispensable key to understanding the tensions and conflicts that give rise to the poetic imagery in her work. The volume includes a number of collages combining image and text. Müller published a complete set of 94 collages under the title Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm. Vom Weggehen und Ausscheren in 1993; although poetic images are densely concentrated here onto single, unbound pages, they form an evolving network of motifs that give unity to the whole.
The novel Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992) is a complete reworking of a filmscript entitled “Der Fuchs der Jäger,” that she co-wrote with Harry Merkle. The main character is a teacher harassed by the Romanian secret police. Through synecdoche Müller portrays the fragmentation of self that occurs in a nation governed by fear. Müller’s latest novel Herztier (1994) is her richest portrayal to date of life in the Romanian dictatorship, in that she links the repressive childhood of her narrator with the brutal oppression of the state. Her most recent work, Hunger und Seide (1995), is a collection of essays, many of them reflections on her situation as nonconformist and dissident in Nitzkydorf and Timisoara.
Müller’s works are characterized by pure, poetic language and metonymic metaphors that recur and evolve throughout her tales. The oppressiveness of theme is alleviated by the beauty of her prose and the flashes of humor behind some of her imagery.
Through words and actions Müller continues to demonstrate her independence from the dogma of church and state. She has been an outspoken critic of those East German writers who collaborated with the secret police, and has recently withdrawn from P.E.N. as a protest against its decision to merge with its former DDR branch. She has won a dozen literary prizes, including the Marieluise-Fleißer Prize (1990), the Kranichsteiner Literary Prize (1991), the Kleist Prize (1994), and the European Literary Prize “Aristeion” (1995).”