Greg Stepanich

Composer marathons: Too much?

Is there anything wrong with devoting a series of concerts to the work of one composer?

Browsing through the archives of On an Overgrown Path, I came across this entry on Shostakovich, in which Pliable (Bob Shingleton) suggests that marathon performances of any composer are not such a good idea, and an anonymous post-er agrees:

I actually feel that wall to wall performances of any composer's work is a rather dodgy thing to do - although much does depend upon the composer I guess! I just feel that no composer ever really writes a piece with the idea of having it performed alongside everything else he has ever written. There is something rather unfair about the exercise.

Both of these writers make a good point, in particular the idea that composers don't plan to have their pieces heard one after the other when they write them. And what about sylistic differences? Many composers have tossed out all their earlier work (Carl Orff, for instance) as unrepresentative of the composer they want the world to know. Listeners interested in the complete picture might find something valuable about hearing how the writer altered his ideas over the years until the sound he or she wanted fit his or her intentions.

Reminds me that in several well-known cases, composers are most represented by their most unrepresentative work. I remember reading a few years back some critics complaining that everyone was programming Webern's Im Sommerwind, which is nothing like his later work. And Saint-Saens is still best-known by Carnival of the Animal, which he didn't want published (except for The Swan).

I think there is a lot of value in hearing lots of one composer at a stretch, but you sort of have to be in a scholarly frame of mind. After a while, even the best composers start to become overfamiliar, and you start to hear their mannerisms writ large, and then you're in the disenchantment phase of your relationship.

Having heard a lot of Verdi recently, for instance, I'm struck by how often he uses grace notes. And having listened to a good deal of Liszt, I hear him run out of steam time and again, unable to create a narrative, just set up sections block on block. Shostakovich resorts to martial rhythms repeatedly; his model Mahler overuses that slow-appoggiatura Wagner cadence that ends up resolving to the subdominant of the relative major rather than the tonic minor.

Too much familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saw says, but for me it's not so much contempt as it evidence that even the greatest writers have a bag of familiar tricks they dip into with frequency.

Anybody else think composer marathons are a bad idea? Like them? Post a comment and we'll discuss it.