April 26, 2009: Balancing act

A friend of mine with a fair amount of experience performing in amateur ensembles once told me that anyone could be a conductor.  There were only a few important rules to follow.  The first one was, "If you can hear the brass, they are playing too loud."

The brass section had a strong presence at last night's performance by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall.  Conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier chose to begin with his own selection of incidental compositions that Georges Bizet had originally composed for a performance of Alphonse Daudet's play, L'Arlésienne (The Woman from Arles) in 1872.  In a theater setting this music was performed by a chamber orchestra, but Bizet subsequently extracted four of the pieces for a suite played by full orchestra.  A second suite was later collected by Ernest Guiraud shortly after Bizet's death.  Tortelier's selection included movements from both of these suites, beginning with a "Pastorale," originally written to accompany the dialogue of two aged lovers meeting after fifty years of separation.

It is hard to imagine anyone trying to hold a conversation during the re-orchestrated version of this music.  It opens with a broad blossoming of full-orchestra sound, a perfect "curtain-raiser" for a concert evening, rather than the stuff of intimate dialogue.  This is precisely the sort of situation in which my friend's first rule applies:  Once you have been bowled over by that first burst of sound, you quickly discover that it is hard to hear anything other than the brass section, even when you can see that everyone else is very busy with their parts!  Fortunately, Tortelier recovered some sense of balance in the following "Carillone," with the horns playing the role of the church bells alternating between foreground and background.  Following the "Menuet" and "Adagietto," the orchestra returned in full force for the "Farandole," based on folk melodies that Bizet appropriated.  This is a wild festive dance in the context of which the protagonist of the play commits suicide (at least in the version I heard as a radio play in my student days);  but the music is all celebration without any dark overtones.  Tortelier conducted it as a real crowd-pleaser;  and the crowd responded appropriately.

Francis Poulenc posed different problems of balance by orchestrating his 1938 organ concerto for nothing more than a full string section and timpani.  I suppose his logic was that any sounds produced by the flow of air could be provided by the organ, and this turned out to be a good judgment call.  The Davies pipe organ has a rich collection of sonorities, and organist Paul Jacobs brought most of them into play.  He also had a sensitive command of his swell pedals, so in many ways he was more responsible for maintaining overall balance than Tortelier was.  Most important is that, because of the way in which its pipes are arrayed, listening to the Davies organ is a very spatial experience, leading me to wonder whether or not Jacobs' selections of stops had as much to do with spatial effects as with always finding the right acoustic fit with the orchestra.

The remainder of the program (after the intermission) was devoted to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams.  First Associate Concertmaster Nadya Tichman performed the violin solo in "The Lark Ascending."  Vaughan Williams began this work in 1914 but set it aside during his military service in the First World War, completing it only in 1920.  The title comes from a poem by George Meredith that begins with the couplet:

He rises and begins to round
He drops the silver chain of sound

We have a tendency to perceive intricate designs in both the songs and flight patters of birds, taking them as well-considered cognitive acts, rather than natural processes.  Vaughan Williams clearly put a lot of cognition into the bird-song element of the violin solo, which plays out to such lengths that the soloist has only a few brief moments of rest.  However, Tichman allowed these intricate melismata to unfold from a position of inner calm, as if to recover the "naturalness" of the "source material" that had inspired by Meredith and Vaughan Williams.  The orchestral resources were very modest (two flutes, one oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, triangle, and strings);  and Tortelier kept all of these forces properly balanced against the solo "voice of the lark."

The full force of the orchestra returned at the end of the evening for Vaughan Williams' 1934 symphony in F minor, his fourth and the first without a programmatic title (having been preceded by "A Sea Symphony," "A London Symphony," and "A Pastoral Symphony").  This is dark music for dark times.  (The musicologist Frank Howes went so far as to suggest that the chain of programmatic titles could have been continued with "A Fascist Symphony.")  Aside from the second (Andante moderato) movement, each movement propels the listener through its relatively formal structures with an unrelenting drive;  and even the second movement contends with dark clouds, coming primarily from the brass section.  By this point in the concert, it was clear that Tortelier had full command of the balance of his resources (even if I was not that sure of his pacing of the second movement);  and the destructive blow that concluded the symphony was emotionally shattering.

Reviewing my personal archives, I see that this is the first time I have written about performances of Vaughan Williams.  There seemed to be far more interest in his work fifty years ago than there is today.  I find this unfortunate, since there is so much diversity and insight in his composition.  I hope that the impact of these two works from last night's program will lead to more opportunities for me to write about his music.