Fifth fest

French fries and milkshake, watermelon and feta cheese … Beethoven’s Fifth and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth?

Few events mark the beginning of the classical concert season like the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s season-opener and this year they kick things off with an unusual but satisfying pairing.

“I think that for me, the combination of these two pieces is, first of all, a celebration of great masterworks that have withstood 100 years of being probed by time for their relevancy,” says conductor Daniel Raiskin, the WSO’s music director. “It’s the quality of music, it’s the quality of narrative that attracts us to these masterworks again and again.”

Both symphonies are so hefty and canonical, one might have expected half of the concert would be devoted to a concerto, tone poem or something smaller or lesser known.

But they are also highly contrasting works. From its thunderous da-da-da-DUM opening to the blazingly sunny arrival of C major in the finale, Beethoven’s Fifth feels like a force of nature, and boasts one of the most famous earworms. It was received badly when it premièred in Vienna in 1808, but in a few years critics recognized it for the revolutionary work it was.

It took another leap into pop cultural fame during the Second World War, when the BBC prefaced wartime broadcasts with the four-note motif, because those notes — short-short-short-long — corresponded to the Morse code for V, then a rallying symbol for victory and resistance.

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, composed over a few months in 1888, is more lyrical and intimate. Written nearly a century later, it may not sound as modern as Richard Wagner or Claude Debussy’s experiments around that time in continental Europe, with their extended dissonance wandering in search of a tonal home that feels elusive.

But the symphony’s lush, expansive orchestration is modern in other ways, anticipating Hollywood film scores. It is, in any case, one of Tchaikovsky’s most celebrated works and the WSO’s performance is a chance to hear T in a setting that isn’t the familiar Nutcracker once again.

Raiskin underlines another key contrast between these works.

“Both, of course, inevitably deal with the notion of fate and the role we tend to assign to the notion of fate taking rule of our lives,” he says.

But where Tchaikovsky, composing in Czarist Russia, described the piece as a struggle with what he called “the inscrutable predestination of Providence,” Beethoven channelled the revolutionary energies of continental Europe — and a healthy helping of his own ego.

“Beethoven famously shouted that he is not going to bend to Fate. He is going to take it by the throat and would never bend to it entirely,” says Raiskin.

Beethoven composed his fifth symphony during the Napoleonic era. By 1804, Beethoven had, in fact, turned against his former hero, after Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French, leading Beethoven to furiously erase Napoleon’s name from his third symphony (Heroica).

But the ideals of individual liberty and self-determination, which Napoleon symbolized in the minds of many radicals, continued to resonate with Beethoven in his struggle against deafness and the arbitrariness of hereditary privilege in the ancien regime.

“What I am, I am through myself. There have been and will be thousands of princes; there is only one Beethoven,” he famously wrote.

Raiskin nods to the relevancy of the work’s optimism of the will in what he calls an era of “environmental catastrophes, wars raging around the world, failing social systems, fractured societies.”

But, as a conductor, there’s a more basic pleasure in programming these two symphonies side by side: really letting the orchestra rip.

“I think it (sets the tone for the rest of the season) because if you look at the rest, you will recognize that it’s a little bit back to the masterworks, rightfully,” he says. “It’s a real celebration of what the symphony orchestra can do best. Overwhelmed with incredible sound, the richness of sonorities, but also by some of the greatest music, by the greatest composers.”

The WSO’s season opening concert is also a chance for Winnipeggers to get to know the orchestra’s new composer-in-residence, Kelly-Marie Murphy. The concert also includes a performance of her new work, Dark Nights, Bright Stars, Vast Universe.

With Murphy first performing with orchestra in the early years of the WSO’s New Music Festival in the 1990s, Raiskin calls her new role at the WSO — where she will now guide the festival — “full circle in a very positive way.”

“It is not going to be that the artistic path and a view of the WSO is suddenly going to look entirely different from what it was a year ago,” he says. “(But) I’m very receptive to any new ideas, and I’m very curious and open to the perspectives Kelly-Marie is going to bring.”

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com