For the second half, John DeMain led a robust performance of the Italian Symphony.
Madison Symphony Orchestra presented the latest of its Beyond the Score series on Jan. 20, and it proved to be the best of these offerings so far.
It was devoted to the “Italian Symphony" by Felix Mendelssohn. In this case, the dramatized script presented as the first part of the program drew upon copious contemporaneous correspondence, plus archival, and other documentary materials, rather than on a script writer’s exaggerated imagination.
A great deal of this material was acted by three members of American Players Theatre. I found Nate Burger, who played Mendelssohn himself, out of character with the composer, but Jonathan Smoots was typically delightful in a number of different roles, and Sarah Day was an able narrator for the entire production. There were abundant visual projections (many of them using the composer’s own drawings), and the orchestra contributed a great many musical clips.
At times, the musical excerpts were used merely to illustrate the spoken text and the visuals, instead of the other way around. But most of the time these unusually well-integrated clips provided the true substance of a fascinating presentation.
It is not well known that Mendelssohn remained dissatisfied with this symphony. Even at the time of the work’s London premiere in 1833, he was making revisions in the score. In 1833 and thereafter he made very significant changes in the latter three movements. But his intentions to re-compose the first movement stalled, and he gave up on the work. It was rarely performed in his lifetime and published only after his death — in essentially the original 1833 version that we still know to this day.
The great value of this Beyond the Score presentation is that it explored the changes and second thoughts of the composer in quite extensive detail. I suspect that few members of the audience knew about all this, and I think their understanding of the greatly popular and beloved work will be considerably enhanced.
After fitting so many little bits of the Mendelssohn’s thoughts and revisions into the audio-visual presentation, the MSO then played the familiar work in its entirety as the concert’s second part. Conductor John DeMain, perhaps feeling liberated from the restraints of fragmentation in the dramatized script, designed this full performance as not only robust but highly exciting. Maybe a bit too much so: I found tempos, especially in the second and fourth movements, somewhat too rushed. But, goodness knows. the audience certainly found it exciting.
