Stéphane Denève made his first appearance conducting the San
Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall last night. (This program
was first performed at the Flint Center in Sunnyvale on Thursday
night.) Born in France and educated at the Paris Conservatoire (where
he graduated with a unanimous First Prize), he is currently Music
Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. He has extensive
conducting experience in both Europe and the United States involving a
wide repertoire of both opera and concert music; but last night it was
clear that a sure command of French music, particularly from the early
twentieth century, was one of his fortes. The second half of the
program consisted of the 1908 suite that Gabriel Fauré prepared based on
incidental music he had composed for a London production of Maurice
Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, followed by Ibéria, a three-movement suite which is the second of Claude Debussy's 1909 Images pour orchestre.
Both
of these suites, almost superposed in time, explore rich palettes of
orchestral color, for which Denève brought a sure sense of balance and
pace. However, he also brought an equally sure sense of contrast, which
was absolutely vital both within each composition and in this
particular side-by-side setting. This was no mere "musical tour of all
things French" but an opportunity to appreciate the differences between
two close contemporaries. As a point of departure for those
differences, one might consider what was happening in painting at that
time. From that point of view, Fauré would appear as an impressionist
in contrast with a more fauvist Debussy. The Pelléas drama is
highly enigmatic, relying more on suggestion than assertion; and
Fauré's music basically sets contexts for the suggestions. Fortunately,
each of the four pieces in the suite is sufficiently well-structured to
be appreciated without extensive knowledge of the drama's narrative,
although, where material was shared across the pieces, Denève conveyed a
good sense of viewing the past from the present.
Ibéria,
on the other hand, consists of three "Spanish scenes" that take us from a
busy day on the streets through a quite "perfumed" night that dawns on
the festive morning of a holiday. Much of the Spanish color is grounded
in a large percussion section (in contrast to Fauré, who restricted his
percussion to the timpani); but the driving energy of the music comes
from the interplay of solo voices (including strings, as well as winds
and brass) against the ensemble. The final movement may take place in
the morning, but the festivities are already breaking down into
unrestrained revelry. Debussy brought a sure command of melodic and
rhythmic fragmentation to capture this gradually emerging chaos.
The
program began with the first San Francisco performance of "blue
cathedral," composed by Jennifer Higdon in 1999 in memory of the recent
death of her younger brother. With its own characteristic approach to
managing the resources of a large and diverse orchestra (and percussion
section), this relatively short piece was in good company with the
orchestral rhetoric of both Fauré and Debussy. However, what I found
most striking was Higdon's ability to bring focus to individual
sounds, rather than the broader "flow" of melodic, harmonic, and
rhythmic progressions. In contrast to other "memorial" works, this is a
composition that almost strives to make time stand still, suspending
time from its flow the same way that memory does. Denève seemed to
"get" this compositional strategy and conducted the subtle interplay of
Higdon's momentary impressions in such a way that this new work was as
accommodating to the audience as were the more familiar French
"standards" of the second half of the program.
The one weakness of
the program was the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 491 C
minor piano concerto with soloist Piotr Anderszewski (also making his
debut with the San Francisco Symphony). Mozart compositions in a minor
key are rare, and each one is a gem in its own right. However, even the
best precious stone ends up only as good as its setting in a piece of
jewelry; and the sensitivity that Denève brought to Fauré and Debussy
(not to mention Higdon) simply did not serve the turbulence and tensions
found at the heart of this particular concerto. This was most evident
in smoothed-over string phrases that would have been better served by
sharper articulation. Similarly Anderszewski tended towards sensitive
delicacy when the aggressiveness of the more "radical"
(as Joseph Kerman put it) Mozart was in order. This more forceful
streak only emerged when Anderszewski played his own cadenzas, leading
me to wonder if he had been deliberately playing down the Mozart in
order to play up his home-made bursts of virtuosity, particularly at the
end of the first movement. For all the insights that Denève brought to
his "French touch," this short-changing of Mozart was still a great
disappointment.
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