For all the ways to prepare for this week's San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall, whether with videos available through the San Francisco Symphony Social Network or by drawing upon SF Classical Music Examiner Scott Foglesong's preview material
for Jean Sibelius's Opus 63 fourth symphony in A minor, nothing could
substitute for the physical experience of being there. From the "chill
factor" of the opening of the Sibelius, which began the evening, to Yuja
Wang's assured pianistic virtuosity in taking on the complexities of
Sergei Prokofiev's Opus 16 second piano concerto in G minor, capped off
by the equally-demanding encore of Arcadi Volodos' beyond-over-the-top
paraphrase of the final movement ("Turkish Rondo") of Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart's K. 331 A major piano sonata (an excerpt of which is available
on video), this evening was an abundance of one physical experience after another.
There
are many factors that can make a piano concerto demanding. We are
usually struck by a high density of notes at a dazzling pace; but
execution goes way beyond simply "scheduling" a large mass of events as
if one were just getting all the holes in place for a player piano. The
real performance challenge comes from the fact that just about all of those notes amount to little more than embellishment;
and, if the performer cannot suss out the "music at the core" of all
that embellishment and keep the "embellishing storm" from obscuring it,
then one might as well be listening to one of those piano rolls. Just
as it was in the days when Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote his
celebrated essay, the "true art of playing keyboard instruments" lies in
recognizing the embellishments for what they are and keeping them under
control.
Still in her early twenties, Wang has a firm command of this "true art" and summons it with little display of those distracting theatrics
that so many performers try to invoke as a substitute for genuine
performance. It was also evident that she and conductor Michael Tilson
Thomas had a clearly-agreed sense of how to pace all of the fireworks in
Prokofiev's score, giving the composer's keen ear for orchestration a
bit of its own time in the limelight. Indeed, it is those orchestral
parts that guide us towards that "music at the core," providing the
armature around which the soloist can shape all the demanding
virtuosity. In this performance I was particularly struck by how much
of that core is fragmentary, formed more of motifs than of full-blown
themes. Indeed, in the course of this four-movement concerto, only the
middle section of the final movement really dwells in any serious way on
a melodic passage that can be called a theme. This turns out to be a
calm before a final storm; but it is also the only time since the
beginning of the concerto when performers (and audience) can catch their
breath.
The mastery of embellishment also lay at the heart of
Wang's encore. Volodos is, himself, a virtuoso pianist in the Russian
tradition of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz with a penchant
for transcription and paraphrase in the tradition of Joseph Hofmann.
His approach to Mozart's rondo is flamboyant, but it also rises to
challenges of counterpoint that Johann Sebastian Bach had mastered so
well. Not content to let Mozart play out the few themes (and, yes, they
are themes this time) in his rondo in the order in which he set
them, Volodos decided to pile them together in a single mass of
simultaneity, it the same spirit with which Bach could join together
multiple subjects in the coda of one of his organ fugues. As was the
case with the Prokofiev concerto, Wang's talent was not only a matter of
putting all those notes in their proper place but also one of keeping
Mozart's own "voice" in focus in the midst of all that paraphrasing.
This
idea of composing around motifs rather than themes contributes
significantly to that "chill factor" of the Sibelius symphony. The
overall language is one of suggestion, rather than statement; and the
suggestions seem to have more to do with the free associations of a
Freudian "dreamscape" (in a sense not that different from the conception
of Clarise Assad's new composition for Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg)
than with more traditional logic and rhetoric. The frame of reference
for this symphony may thus be similar to that of August Strindberg's Dream Play.
This would be consistent with Sibelius having preceded this symphony
with work on incidental music for a performance of Strindberg's Svanevit (Swanwhite), as well as incidental music for Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, another play that resides more in a dreamscape than in the logic of waking life.
Thomas
prefaced his performance with a few remarks and examples of some of the
disquieting elements of this symphony. This helped to prepare the ears
for the music that would then unfold, bringing a clarity to the
diversity of resources that keep bumping into each other and making some
of the more repetitious obsessions more accessible. These were not the
best conditions to feature a solo cello; but Peter Wyrick clearly
grasped the spirit of the overall vision in which he played a part,
lending an air of poignancy to his solo voice finding its way through
this dreamscape.
In the midst of all these challenges to the
serious listener, Mason Bates may have been at a disadvantage in the
first performances of his "Five Pieces for Orchestra &
Electronica." Just calling this suite The B-Sides invoked the
connotation of the second-rate flip sides of old pop singles, which
usually served no purpose beyond material for guess-what-this-is
puzzles. This is hardly consistent with Thomas having approached Bates
with the idea of a new work in the spirit of the five pieces for
orchestra that Arnold Schoenberg had composed in 1909.
On the
other hand Schoenberg's approach to orchestral writing was very much a
shock to the system of his time. For all we know, his work may have
been a factor towards Sibelius exploring motif in place of melody and in
abandoning structural logic for something more like free association.
Similarly, Bates' attempt to bring the sounds of contemporary club
culture into Davies could be heard (if not listened to) as a similar
shock to the system. Furthermore, that shock was definitely a physical
one that had not been adequately captured in any of those preparatory
video experiences. At the very least this was a bold experiment; but,
as probably was the case when Schoenberg's pieces first burst upon the
scene, it is hard to tell what to make of the experience beyond the
initial shock. Ironically, in the context of the pervasive malaise
induced by Sibelius, Bates' sounds tended to come off as less shocking
and more soothing, if not tending a bit towards the banal and trite.
Perhaps the problem is that that shock value was not there at the level
it had been for Schoenberg. Those of us who are not part of that club
culture still cannot avoid it through the movies and television programs
we watch, not to mention its impact of advertising. We have become
inured to the sounds of that culture, so our systems are far more shocked by the uncertainties of Sibelius' moods or piano virtuosity carried far beyond what we have come to expect.
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