Painters and firebirds

Some listeners are sick to death of the same old music, while others have enough challenges in their lives and long for familiar comforts. How do you satisfy them all?
For this Saturday’s MasterWorks entry, Lansing Symphony maestro Timothy Muffitt has assembled a meaty, all-orchestral program that confronts this dilemma head-on.
The pivotal work is not Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” the spectacular evening closer. It’s a little-heard masterpiece by 20th-century German composer Paul Hindemith, the suite from his opera “Mathis der Maler,” or “Mathis the Painter.”
“I felt like it’s a piece we need to play — a piece our audience should have the chance to experience live,” Muffitt said. “It’s one of the jewels of the 20th-century symphony, and it’s a rarity.”
Each of the work’s three movements is inspired by a painting by Mathis Grünewald — a German Renaissance painter caught in the violence, war and class unrest of the Reformation and the 1525 Peasants’ Revolt.
Grunewald’s artistic and personal struggles hit a nerve with Hindemith, whose music was banned by the Nazi regime.
“He gets caught in the powerfully working machinery of State and Church,” Hindemith explained at the 1938 premiere of the opera in Zürich. (He fled Germany in 1935 and ended up teaching at Yale.) “His paintings tell us vividly how the wild times with all their misery, their illnesses, and their wars unnerved him.”
Grünewald’s, and Hindemith’s, struggle to find an artistic voice in chaotic times hits the same nerve today.
“It’s about how an artist responds to turbulent times, and there’s plenty of turmoil and drama, but it’s a beautiful and optimistic work,” Muffitt said.
Muffitt can uncork the orchestral thunder and lighting with the best of them, but he excels at making a case for less flashy, finely crafted music that rewards close listening.
“There’s a lot of Bach, a lot of coolness, a lot of reserve, and not so much of the overt sentimentality we were finding in Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky,” Muffitt said.

With Hindemith’s music as the pivot, the maestro set about framing the evening with three works that contrast and resonate with it in multiple ways.
In the gorgeous suite “Ancient Airs and Dances,” Ottorino Respighi “works a fascination with early music into his own musical vocabulary,” Muffitt said, and the result is sometimes charming, sometimes spine-tingling. Respighi’s faithful re-creation of pre-Renaissance music contrasts nicely with “Mathis der Maler,” in which Hindemith sweeps out the catacombs, harmonizing and orchestrating two Renaissance tunes in his own clean, modern style.
The most familiar work on Saturday’s slate, Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” is so vividly colored it seems to engage the remaining four senses and the ears.
“It’s one of the first pieces of modern music, a stepping-off point for many composers that followed,” Muffitt said.
Muffitt wanted to send people home with a blast from the big “renegade” of the early 20th century, Igor Stravinsky.
“He is representing the avant-garde, even though this is one of his least avant-garde works,” Muffitt admitted.
“I felt we really needed that balance from the musical perspective. We’re feeling his romantic Russian roots and his French influence. That’s why this is on here, rather than ‘The Rite of Spring’ or ‘Petrushka’ or one of his more avant-garde pieces.”
In addition to providing one of the most thrilling climaxes in all of symphonic music, “The Firebird” ties many of the evening’s musical and thematic threads together. Like Debussy, Stravinsky draws on mythology and folklore of the past, a common device among composers of the romantic era. But “The Firebird” is also a preview of coming attractions — or, rather, disruptions — as the world tumbled into the chaos of the 20th century.
“We get into parts of this music that project some of the rhythmic and harmonic innovations that are about to come from his pen, just a few years after he wrote this work,” Muffitt said.
There’s an undertow to the entire evening, a convergence of ancient and modern currents, that is likely to resonate with listeners riding out a similar whirlpool a century later.
“The turn of the 20th century was a time of unprecedented and different kinds of musical creativity,” Muffitt said. “This is a time capsule, a snapshot of four different directions music was taking.”