April 19, 2009: The making of a masterpiece

This week's San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall had to endure a series of changes.  Illness prevent Oliver Knussen from conducting an innovative program that included his own compositions, a work by Julian Anderson, and Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in the seldom-heard orchestration by Leopold Stokowski.  Alasdair Neale agreed to step in to replace Knussen;  but the compositions of Knussen and Anderson for the first half of the program were replaced by three works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:  the overture to his Marriage of Figaro opera (K. 492), the K. 165 Exsultate, jubilate (sung by Lisa Saffer, scheduled to perform Knussen's songs), and the K. 504 D major "Prague" symphony.  In the second half the Stokowski orchestration of Pictures was replaced by the more familiar version by Maurice Ravel.  Unfortunately, Neale also succumbed to illness;  and the replacement program was conducted by Donato Cabrera.

Mussorgsky's suite is so well known in its Ravel orchestration that it is interesting to contemplate how this came to be.  Michael Steinberg's notes for the program book provided the background:

In 1922 the French composer Maurice Ravel told the Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky about this set of fascinating piano pieces.  Koussevitzky, his enthusiasm fired, asked Ravel to orchestrate them.  It was through this orchestration, and through Koussevitzky's frequent and brilliant performances, that Pictures at an Exhibition became an indispensable repertory item.

As they say, it's all about the promotion.

Still, we should not sell Ravel's promotional effort short.  Steinberg calls his orchestration "a model of what we would ask for in technical brilliance, imaginative insight, and concern for the original composer;"  but it is far more than that.  It is such a sophisticated exploration of the power and diversity of orchestral color that recording technology has yet to do justice to its subtleties.  Anyone who thinks (s)he knows this music on the basis of one or more recordings is inevitably surprised (pleasantly, I hope) at how much more there is to hear in the concert hall.  When we then recall how other composers, such as Sergei Prokofiev, could complain about Koussevitzky's competence as a conductor, we may also wish to credit Ravel with fitting the task to the man, rather than pursuing the orchestration as a challenge in its own right.

Cabrera has a resume of contemporary music performances that extends far beyond anything Koussevitzky would have dared to conduct, but he was also operating in a severely limited time frame.  He clearly benefited from Ravel's respect for the "working musician;"  but he also gave more than due respect to all of the skills Ravel summoned for his task.  For all the difficulties leading up to the performance, this work still emerged as one of the best examples of the season of why there is still no substitute for the concert hall when it comes to listening to such music.

Unfortunately, Mozart's share of the program did not fare quite so well.  While Cabrera conducted the necessary reduced string section, there were still problems of balance, both among the strings and with the other voices.  This was particularly evident in Exsultate, jubilate, where if felt as if there was no connection between Saffer and the orchestra.  Last year K. 504 was conducted by Herbert Blomstedt;  and I was particularly struck by his use of "Mannheim dynamics," through which a gradual crescendo could carry more rhetorical impact than the usual piano-forte contrast.  With only a few exceptions Cabrera pretty much stuck to the conventional piano-forte "opposition," which struck me as a less stimulating interpretation.  Sadly, this was the second time in as many weeks that I felt Mozart was not getting his proper due;  but there are good signs that this trend will change as we move into May!