September 10, 2009: Three waltzes and a spectacle

The San Francisco Symphony Opening Night Gala at Davies Symphony Hall has always been primarily a social event, first out of the gate to mark the beginning of the concert season.  The visual feast for the society pages tends to take priority over what is actually happening up on the stage.  Nevertheless, Michael Tilson Thomas cannot fail to bring his dedicated approach to listening to every event he conducts;  and, on this particular occasion, he dared to complement the social Glitzkrieg with program choices that would both fascinate the ear and tweak the little grey cells at the other end of the auditory cortex.  That he achieved all this while holding to a relatively familiar repertoire makes his achievement all the more impressive.

Given the festive nature of the evening, the choice of three waltzes for the opening half of the program seemed a natural one;  but the devil was in the details, in more ways than one.  Thus, while Salzburg could begin its festival with a Josef Strauss assortment, coupled with Franz Schubert's earlier settings of German dances (albeit orchestrated by Anton Webern), Thomas' selections were as removed from Viennese Gemütlichkeit as one could get.  Indeed, the very decision to begin with Franz Liszt, who honored the spirit of his native Hungary's efforts to rid itself of Austrian control, was contrarian, if not diabolic;  but "The Dance in the Village Inn," the second of two orchestral episodes based on Nicolaus Lenau's 1836 Faust:  A Poem, better known as the first of the four "Mephisto" waltzes for piano, sealed the deal for the devil.  Inspired by Lenau having Mephisto play a violin for the drunken inn patrons, Liszt has Mephisto play the whole orchestra with that same sense of excess that Liszt brought to his own piano performances, providing Thomas to show off the full capacity of our orchestra from the very beginning of his program.

The second waltz came from Maurice Ravel, who, as a veteran of the First World War, was no more keen on Austria than Liszt's Hungarian compatriots were.  "La Valse" was composed in 1919;  and the spirit of the work was brilliantly captured in a single sentence by the late Michael Steinberg in the notes for the program book:

Waltzing Vienna was no longer to be seen in quite the same way, and so La Valse became a bitter and ferocious fantasy, a terrifying tone poem that helped define a new language of musical nightmare.

Ravel wrote the work on a commission from Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes;  but, to reduce the devil-in-the-details theme to the bare vernacular, Diaghilev had no idea what the hell to do with it.  Bronislava Nijinska eventually choreographed the work for Ida Rubinstein in 1929;  but the choreographer who really "got it" was George Balanchine, who conceived it as the Dance of Death that was latent in the music.  I was fortunate enough to see the New York City Ballet perform this work during my student years.  It remains the scariest Balanchine work I ever saw, if not the scariest of all the ballets I have seen.

Ravel conceived the work as one of images emerging from obscurity.  As they become clearer, their nightmarish qualities become more and more evident.  By the final bars the entire orchestra is acting out a conflict between succumbing to and driving off what has become an obsessive presence of the waltz' three-beat pulse.  Taken has a whole, the work is one long crescendo at the climax of which all falls lifeless, just as Balanchine has his lead ballerina do.  This is a work that demands intense control;  and Thomas' control was so effective that it elicited gasps from his party-festive audience.

In preparing this text, I consulted Balanchine's own description of his ballet in Balanchine's New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.  When the girl dies, her lover raises her body and turns around in place while holding it above his head.  Balanchine concludes:

About the circling center, the group races in a fateful, fantastic carousel.

To say that this sentence influenced Thomas' to select Richard Rodgers' "Carousel Waltz" as his third waltz would be way too much of a stretch.  This latter waltz served as the overture for one of the darkest of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, and there is a fair amount of French influence in Rodgers' music, particularly in his orchestrations.  In this work there are even hints of the polytonality of Darius Milhaud.  However, this is neither the stuff of Ravel's nightmares or of Liszt's devil-worship.  Indeed, it is the closest we got to echt Gemütlichkeit in the program that Thomas prepared, which may explain why it was so popular in Vienna when the Symphony played it there on their 2007 tour.

For the second half of the program, Lang Lang was the featured soloist in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev's third C major piano concerto, Opus 26.  In a historical context Ravel composed "La Valse" within the period of time it took Prokofiev to complete this work (begun in 1917 and completed in 1921).  However, if Ravel wished to draw his images from out of the shadows, all is crystal clarity from beginning to end in this concerto, which is probably the most popular of the five Prokofiev composed.  That clarity is evident in the solo piano work and its balance against a rich palette of orchestral colors.

Lang's popularity made him a perfect choice for a Gala concert.  Nevertheless, I had quite a few problems with his performance of Frédéric Chopin's first (Opus 11) piano concerto in E minor, which he played with the San Francisco Symphony this past December;  and I have used my blog to try to analyze my discontent in the context of the observations of other critics.  My biggest problem was that his physical performance tended to distract from the musical to a point where it almost seemed as if it had been choreographed and therefore came off as contrived.  From this point of view, his Prokofiev was far more satisfying;  and I can think of at least one good way to account for this.  The technical demands that Prokofiev makes on the pianist are so intense in both detail and physical challenge that any superfluous movement would be enough to bring the tightrope walker down from his heights.  The work can only succeed with maximum focus.  Lang brought that focus to his performance, and the result was all that one could wish from this concerto.

Thus, whatever the society columnists may write, this was an evening that demanded and rewarded serious listening;  and that speaks well for the promise of the season to come!