December 10, 2009: Precious moments

Among the generation of composers that began to emerge after the Second World War, there was considerable attention given to structure with visions of intricate details that would join together in service of larger-scale architectural plans.  Arnold Schoenberg's work with twelve-tone rows provided new ways of thinking about structure on both small and large scales;  but for this new generation the paragon of structuralism was Schoenberg's student, Anton Webern.  Many of the early essays of Karlheinz Stockhausen involved detailed structural analysis of Webern's scores, particularly in the period after Webern began to work with Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.  This made for an interesting parallel with Webern's own doctoral research into the structural intricacies of the sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Isaac.  As a result, the third quarter of the twentieth century became dominated by a highly academic (and often mathematical) approach to the syntax of musical scores, much to the disadvantage of matters of "logic" and "rhetoric" (if we are to use the medieval trivium as a baseline).  It took another quarter century of dry and tedious (not to mention tendentious) performances and recordings before another generation would emerge and recognize that Webern had composed music, rather than mere syntactic structures;  and we as serious listeners are now in a position to appreciate that awakening.

The merits of Webern's musical intuitions for such previously disregarded factors as rhetoric were clearly evident last night at Davies Symphony Hall in the San Francisco Symphony performance of his Opus 21 symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas.  This is a work of extraordinary detail in which every note signifies less through any sense of melodic line or harmonic accompaniment but rather through relations of temporal proximity that disregard boundaries between instruments.  Under a microscope this is musical pointillism (whose reductio ad absurdum emerged in Webern's 1935 orchestration of the six-voice fugue from the Musikalisches Opfer of Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 1079, Number 5).  However, Thomas pulled back from the individual moments of those "points" themselves, delivering the symphony with the same sense of musical flow we would expect of any other symphony.

I would not be surprised if it took considerable effort to achieve that sense of flow.  Among other things, it involves a heightened awareness by each musician of all other musicians, since that flow is not confined to traditional sectional boundaries.  Nevertheless, the results of that effort were clearly to the benefit of those still trying to find their way through the experiences of listening to Webern.  The one disadvantage is that such effort may have detracted from the preparation of the rest of the program.

That even included the other Webern offering of the evening, the first San Francisco Symphony performance of his 1931 orchestration of the six German dances by Franz Schubert, D. 820.  Here there was still a sense that Thomas was working through a microscope, wanting to make sure that even the smallest instrumentation decision behind every moment was not lost on us.  Unfortunately, what was lost was the underlying spirit of these short pieces as dance music.  It was as if we had been transported from the ballroom to the classroom, and I find it hard to believe that such a classroom was the venue Webern had envisioned for these earthy little pieces.  They required a little less reverence and a lot more Gemütlichkeit, and it is unfortunate that this staid performance provided our introduction to Webern for the evening and San Francisco's first taste of this side of Webern's orchestration skills.

The decision to couple Webern with Ludwig van Beethoven also proved problematic.  The two works on the program from the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Opus 58 piano concerto in G major from 1806 and the Opus 67 C minor symphony (the fifth) from 1808, are clearly products of Beethoven at the top of his game;  but the mindset established by Weber's symphony did not provide a complimentary light for either of these works.  This may have just been an unfortunate consequence of time management, giving far more attention to Webern under the assumption that the basic technical skills were already in place for Beethoven.  Such an assumption may have been valid enough, but neither the concerto nor the symphony emerged with sufficient identity to establish its own sense of performance.

In the case of the concerto, it also seemed as if soloist Emanuel Ax wanted to explore new approaches by going down paths that Thomas was reluctant to follow.  Ax certainly commanded attention by arpeggiating the opening chord, which would have made for a startling new perspective had Thomas worked with him to settle on a suitable orchestral response;  but, instead, Thomas just held to Beethoven's original playbook.  The result was a perfectly satisfactory reading but one in which the promise of new ways to listen to the familiar offered by that first arpeggio was never really fulfilled.

More disappointing was the C minor symphony, where an excess of rhetoric tended to diminish attention to the logic and syntax (to go back to the trivium).  As the old joke (first told to me by a trumpet player) goes, if you can hear the brass, they are playing too loud;  and there were certainly more than a few occasions when the brass was covering up some of Beethoven's more interesting writing, particularly when it involved the lower strings.  Then there were the timpani, which seemed to be struck entirely with mallets with particularly stiff heads.  This made every note a highly striking (pun intended) one;  but it left me wondering whether a visitor from Mars (who had not heard this music from childhood) might mistake this symphony for a concerto for timpani and orchestra.

If these performances were, indeed, a result of putting more time into Webern at the expense of less time for Beethoven, was that decision worth it?  As far as I am concerned, the answer is emphatically, "Yes!"  To warp the old line from Casablanca, "We'll always have Beethoven."  There is no danger that we face a future of concerts in which Beethoven will not get the attention he deserves.  Opportunities to hear Webern, on the other hand, are far fewer;  and every one of them should count towards strengthening the pleasure we can take in listening to his music.  Last night's performance of the symphony counted about as high as anyone could have anticipated.

December 4, 2009: Preparing for George Benjamin

Those interested in giving (or asking to receive) a less-than-ordinary gift for this Holiday season would do well to consider tickets either to one of the Project San Francisco events between January 7 and 17, during which the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) will be hosting the composer George Benjamin or one of the recordings of Benjamin's music currently available.  Benjamin is no stranger to either San Francisco or the Symphony.  Public Relations for the Symphony described his background as follows:

George Benjamin first appeared with the SFS in 1992 as conductor, pianist, and Artistic Director of the Wet Ink Festival, the SFS’ celebration of contemporary composers.  Over the course of the festival the SFS performed his At First Light and the U.S. premieres of his works Antara and Piano Sonata.  Benjamin also performed an improvised piano accompaniment to the silent films Ben-Hur and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. In 1999 he made his subscription series conducting debut with the SFS, leading his own works Viola, Viola (with former Principal Viola Geraldine Walther and current Associate Principal Viola Yun Jie Liu) and Three Inventions, and Ligeti’s Piano Concerto featuring Pierre-Laurent Aimard.  At other times the SFS has performed his Palimpsest, Sudden Time and Three Studies for Solo Piano. 

“Having always regarded [the SFS] as a quite wonderful orchestra, I’ve been particularly struck in recent years by the development of a remarkable new glow and warmth in their sonority,” Benjamin said. “Their loyalty and interest in my work over the decades touches me more than I can say.  In a program that I will conduct, performances of my oldest and newest orchestral works will be juxtaposed with music by my teacher, Messiaen, and also by an earlier composer particularly close to my heart, Ravel.”

The core of Benjamin's visit will consist of two concerts in the Symphony subscription series and one chamber music performance:

On January 17 Benjamin will join SFS musicians as pianist in a chamber music concert, where he will perform his Piano Figures. Jonathan Vinocour and Yun Jie Liu will be featured in his Viola, Viola. In pre-concert talks, free to all ticketholders, before the performances on January 7, 9, and 10 Benjamin will speak in conversation with Peter Grunberg and January 14,15, and 16 with Laura Stanfield Prichard. The Friday 6.5 concert on January 8 conducted by David Robertson will include Benjamin’s remarks about his works Jubilation and Dance Figures. Immediately following the concert on Saturday, January 16 Benjamin will participate in Off the Podium, an informal question and answer session free to all audience members that evening.

At the first of the subscription concerts, David Robertson will also conduct Felix Mendelssohn's third ("Scottish") symphony and Michael Jarrell's arrangements of three piano etudes by Claude Debussy in addition to Jubilation and Dance Figures.  Benjamin himself will conduct the second concert, which will include his earliest orchestral work, Ringed by the Flat Horizon, and the West Coast premiere of his 2008 piano concerto, Duet, with soloist Nicholas Hodges making his San Francisco Symphony debut.  The program will also include Oiseaux exotiques, by Benjamin's composing mentor, Olivier Messiaen, and two works by Maurice Ravel, the Mother Goose suite and Rapsodie espagnole.

Those interested in approaching these concerts with some listening experience may wish to begin at the beginning with the Nimbus recording that includes Ringed by the Flat Horizon performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder.  Another approach would be through Dance Figures, also available as a Nimbus recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen, since this is a suite of nine short movements.  (For those who really want to approach this music in small doses, these movements are also available as individual MP3 downloads!)  Having listened to both of these recordings, my own advice would be to start with the short movements of Dance Figures.  However, I am not sure that listening for any "dance-like nature" will be any more rewarding than it would be when one listens to the "dance-based" compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach or Robert Schumann, which I recently discussed.  What is most striking about these short works is the breadth of sonic qualities covered by the nine movements.  The second of those movements, "Recit," even appears to be playing with the physical theory of sound quality as a superposition of overtones.  Maurice Ravel experimented with this effect in his "Bolero," as did Toshiro Mayuzumi in his 1958 "Nirvana Symphony."  However, Benjamin seems to have moved beyond the experimental efforts of those who preceded him to apply this technique to his own approach to what others have called "spectral music."

After one becomes used to Benjamin's interest in working with "the sound itself," one can then turn to his earlier Ringed by the Flat Horizon.  In this case I have to wonder whether he is not only working with sound but also trying to evoke a sonic version of a literary pun.  I say this because the (ringing) sounds of metallic percussion both begin and conclude (encircle?) the composition.  If he is playing a literary game, then he is playing it subtly and using it as an infrastructure to work with variation in sonic qualities on a time scale longer than that of the Dance Figures movements.

Of course, whenever one needs to tune in to the sort of details of sound quality that a composer like Benjamin (or his mentor Messiaen) can summon, one will always run into shortcomings if one relies on recordings.  This music needs to be experienced through live performance in a space that lends itself to all of those subtleties of detail.  Davies Symphony Hall is definitely such a space, so those attracted by either of the recordings I have just cited will inevitably find a far broader listening experience by attending at least one of the San Francisco Symphony scheduled performances.

November 28, 2009: Bach's Christmas spirit

The Holidays with the Symphony series of concerts at Davies Symphony Hall began last night with a performance of the Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 of Johann Sebastian Bach by the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus under the direction of Ragnar Bohlin.  Soloists for the occasion were soprano Malin Christensson, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, tenor Lothar Odinius, and baritone Anders Larsson.  As I had observed at the beginning of this month, this work is actually a compilation of six cantatas, each of which was performed at a service for one of the twelve days of Christmas (the first day, the second day, the third day, New Year's Day, the Sunday after New Year, and the Feast of the Epiphany on the final day).  However, while these are six separate works, the Biblical texts cover a single narrative arc of the Christmas story, beginning, as the gospels do, with the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem for tax registration and concluding with the decision of the three Wise Men to return to their own lands without informing Herod of their encounter with Jesus.  As is the case with all of Bach's cantatas, the "lessons" from the Bible are interspersed with music to encourage meditation by the congregation, including solo arias, hymn settings, many in chorale prelude form, and one orchestral sinfonia.  The Wikipedia entry set the duration of the entire oratorio at "nearly three hours."

This is the same time scale as the Saint Matthew Passion, which was originally performed in its entirety on Good Friday.  However, while Good Friday is intended to be set aside as an entire day of intense religious meditation, Christmas is a time of feasts and fellowship.  One still attended church to remember the reason for the feasting, but the time spent there was far more limited than it was on Good Friday.  This is probably the reason that Bohlin chose to present only selections from each of the six cantatas, keeping the scale of the evening at a duration comparable to most Symphony concerts.  This might upset purists who believe that Bach's texts should be honored in every detail of the letter;  but, if they really wanted to be pure about the matter, they would insist on having each cantata performed on its appropriate date.

Those purists would probably also object to Bohlin's decision to have the texts sung in English.  However, this decision also honors the spirit of the music.  Since Bach was not a deep religious scholar, he probably never encountered the passage in Talmud that advises one to pray in the language one understands the best, thus emphasizing the desire to communicate with God, rather than just marking time with the alien babble of ritual.  Since each cantata is essentially an extended prayer, Bach probably would have assumed that non-Germans would pray in their own language.  After all, it was not as if the extra-Biblical texts he selected were high literature.  The author is unidentified, which may be just as well.  The devotional spirit of the music that highlights the text is far more sincere than the superficiality of the text itself.

It is also worth nothing that Bohlin chose the English translation by Henry S. Drinker for this performance.  For those unfamiliar with Drinker, his work was significant enough to earn him an entry in Grove Music Online by Jon Newsom.  Here are a few sentences that represent his contributions:

A lawyer by profession, he devoted himself in his spare time to music and from 1930 to 1960 he held informal gatherings (known as the ‘Accademia dei Dilettanti di Musica’) at his home to study and perform vocal music of the 17th to 20th centuries. (He also conducted larger groups on Sunday evenings.) Concerned that the words should be understood but also fit the music, Drinker began a series of translations remarkable for their craftsmanship and sheer number: between 1941 and 1954 he translated many Bach works (212 cantatas, the St Matthew Passion and the St John Passion, the Easter and Christmas oratorios and the Magnificat), all Brahms's vocal works, all Mozart's choral works, all Schumann's and Medtner's songs, all the solo songs of Wolf, Musorgsky and Schubert and all Schubert's partsongs.

As a Philadelphian I can claim a degree of separation from Drinker of either one or two.  My own choir master certainly knew about those Sunday evening gatherings.  If he never attended one himself, he certainly knew those who did.  I remember his once telling me that Drinker insisted that everyone sing at those events.  He then paused and added, "Including Leopold Stokowski!"  Naturally, most of my experience in singing Bach cantatas involved Drinker's translations;  and I admire them as much today as I did as a student.

This was thus an evening that evoked Bach's own spirit of Christmas.  While it may not have been faithful to every note and word in the original score, the performance by reduced orchestra and chorus served the clarity of the notes that were performed excellently.  The choice of movements was sufficient to move the overall narrative at a brisk pace, and Bohlin's tempo selections maintained that pace.  The four soloists similarly captured this sense of spirit, making for an excellent launch of this year's holiday season.

November 22, 2009: Chamber music under the 'anxiety of influence'

There is this precious (perhaps too much so) scene in Wes Craven's 1999 film Music of the Heart, in which Isaac Stern is "introducing" Carnegie Hall to Roberta Guaspari (played by Meryl Streep).  He talks of all the sounds one can still hear resonating in the Hall, still reverberating past performances by Fritz Kreisler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Jascha Heifetz, and others.  (Those may not be exactly the names he cited, but you get the point.)  I do not know if Stern actually said these things when the real Guaspari brought her string orchestra of Harlem students to perform there to raise money for her music education program, but Stern was never one for acting from a script.  The fact is, however, that every major concert hall resonates with its past performances;  and Davies Symphony Hall is no exception.  You do not have be an Isaac Stern.  You just have to be a regular concert goer to appreciate that the past is always there each time you attend an event.

Sometimes, however, when the past is too proximal, those resonances may not be conducive to the present.  Thus, it was hard for chamber music on a Sunday afternoon not to be influenced by the blazing finale to Johannes Brahms' second symphony that had taken place only sixteen hours previously, not to mention the reverberating forces of Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Wagner that preceded that symphony.  Just as the young Felix Mendelssohn was a tough act to follow the mature Franz Schubert in a string quartet recital this past June, much of the chamber music repertoire would be similarly vulnerable to the full force of symphonic monuments, even after over half a day had elapsed.

By all rights the G major string quintet by Antonín Dvorák should have derived some benefit from proximity to that Brahms symphony.  Brahms first became acquainted with Dvorák's music in 1877, the year in which that second symphony performed last night was completed;  and Brahms was sufficiently impressed that he recommended Dvorák to his publisher Simrock.  That G major quintet was one of the first works sent to Simrock;  but it went through revisions, only converging on its final form in 1888, when Simrock republished it with the misleading Opus number 77.  While the opening sonata form movement is more than a little callow, the Scherzo movement definitely shows signs of the Dvorák-yet-to-come, as does the emotional principle theme of the following Poco andante.  On the other hand Dvorák's sense of a Finale has a way to go before coming up to the caliber of his mentor.  Nevertheless, the performers (violinists Diane Nicholeris and John Chisholm, violist Jonathan Vinocour, cellist David Goldblatt, and bassist Scott Pingel) certainly did much to reveal the potential of the music and why it struck Brahms' attention as positively as it did.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was on much more solid ground with his K. 407 quintet in E-flat major for horn and strings.  For one thing the strings consisted of only one violin (Dan Carlson), two violas (Jonathan Vinocour and Katie Kadarauch), and cello (Amos Yang), making for a relatively unconventional string sound.  Furthermore, this is yet another piece of Mozart's chamber music that is more in the spirit of a concerto (in this case for horn) and "very small orchestra;"  and Jessica Valeri certainly had the chops to deliver a concerto-style performance.  Finally, as a result of Mozart's personal relationship with the original horn player, Joseph Ignaz Leutgeb, this is a work that abounds with wit, much of which derives from clever brief interruptions of total silence.  Whether or not this was the work that inspired Ludwig van Beethoven to pursue a similar approach to silence in early works such as his Opus 2 piano sonatas can be left for debate by musicologists, but the technique is an effective one in the hands of both Mozart and Beethoven.

The composer whose music had the hardest time with any residue of nineteenth-century symphonic sounds in Davies was Bohuslav Martinu.  His four-movement 1937 sonata for flute, violin, and piano was never intended to be more than a lightweight "romp" (to use the same noun that James Keller engaged in his notes for the program book).  Its playful spirit would probably have been more infectious in a more intimate setting;  but flautist Catherine Payne, violinist John Chisholm, and pianist Robin Sutherland could not quite pull it off in the Davies space, not at least with all those spirits lingering from last night.

November 22, 2009: Schoenberg the middleman

It is hard to imagine a better program to illustrate the musical tensions of the latter half of the nineteenth century and their impact on the early twentieth than the one prepared by Sir Simon Rattle for the second concert by the Berliner Philharmoniker in Davies Symphony Hall last night.  On the one hand we had Richard Wagner, trying to transcend the musical conventions of his time by serving the dramatic visions of his own idiosyncratic version of hero mythology.  That transcendence would carry him into unknown territories of ambiguous harmonies and sinuous melodies that never seemed to come to closure.  On the other had there was Johannes Brahms, clearly laboring under the influence of Beethoven but always seeking out new approaches to structure to fend off succumbing to that influence.  Brahms believed one could move forward without rejecting the past with the flamboyance of Wagnerian transcendence.

Rattle selected these two composers to begin and conclude, respectively, last night's concert.  He began with the opening prelude for Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ironically the one opera that turns away from the exploits of mythic heroes in favor of the affairs of ordinary mortals (who happen to be seriously involved with the practice of music, but in an amateur capacity).  After the intermission he concluded the evening with Brahms' second symphony, Opus 73 in D major, a work that comfortably dons the attire of nineteenth-century symphonic style without shying away from some significantly progressive advances in formal structure.

Between the dialectical opposition of Brahms' defense of the thesis of symphonic form and Wagner's defiant antithesis through dramatism, Rattle introduced Arnold Schoenberg as an agent of Hegelian synthesis through this composer's first chamber symphony, Opus 9.  Originally conceived for fifteen solo instruments in 1906 (Opus 9a), Schoenberg later published a version (Opus 9b) for full orchestra, which probably received its first performance in 1936.  This is a work that owes much to the impact that Wagner had on how one could think about harmony at all;  and it is hard to listen to the opening chord progression without reflecting on the first chord progression of Tristan und Isolde, regarded by many as the first gesture of twentieth-century music.  However, if Wagner worked by extending his melodic lines to greater lengths, Schoenberg tended to prefer smaller scales, often reducing a melodic motif to a single interval, if not a single chord.  Nevertheless, like Brahms, Schoenberg was also occupied with questions of overall architecture;  and Opus 9 may be viewed as the culmination of the ideal set forth by Robert Schumann, Brahms' mentor, to encompass all of symphonic form in a single movement.  Schoenberg thus takes the fundamental disagreement between Wagner and Brahms over "which way is forward" and turns opposition into "peaceful coexistence" in this twenty-minute single-movement symphony.

A composition that packs so much legacy into such a brief period of time is clearly fodder for analysts anxious to expose every last intricate detail.  Indeed, one of the first extended analyses of this work was published by Schoenberg's own pupil, Alban Berg, in 1913.  The real analysis, however, comes from those who aspire to do this work justice through performance, caring less about each "tree of intellect" out of preference for the forest of "the music itself."  Rattle has had this aspiration at least since his days with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which provided his first serious "laboratory" for mastering Schoenberg performance technique.  Now he has brought that mastery to Berlin to expand the scope of an orchestra that pretty much sets the bar when it comes to performances of both Brahms and Wagner.

The result was nothing short of dazzling.  Schoenbergian passages that have left other conductors in a fog emerge in crystal clarity under Rattle's guidance.  The "themes" clearly have no place in nineteenth-century traditions;  but there is no doubt in the listener's mind that this composition is a symphony.  Indeed, from a rhetorical point of view, it comes to a triumphant conclusion that does not differ in any substantive way from the conclusion of Brahms' second symphony or, for that matter, the Meistersinger prelude.  Schoenberg was not just being irritable about his personal frustrations when he said, "My music is not modern;  it's just badly played."  He was just stating the obvious precept that one cannot perform without understanding and that understanding often takes hard work.  Rattle's efforts on Schoenberg's behalf have become our benefits in the form of experiences of listening to Schoenberg that those who preceded us rarely, if every, had for themselves.

When the Berliner Philharmoniker began its current tour at Carnegie Hall, James Oestreich wrote the following about Rattle's approach to Brahms in The New York Times:

… Mr. Rattle’s readings of Brahms’s Second Symphony on Thursday and the Third and Fourth on Friday (the First was reviewed in these pages on Friday) were altogether more compelling than his Mahler performances with the orchestra at Carnegie two years ago. There he seemed to be laboring to extract performances forcibly from the players; here he seemed more inclined simply to let them play.

To some extent Oestreich may have been influenced by the minimality of Rattle's activities on the podium.  I prefer to think that, while meticulous guidance may have been necessary to do justice to the performance of Schoenberg, where Brahms was concerned much of the technique required for performance had been internalized.  As I had observed in his approach to the Orchestra at the San Francisco Conservatory on Thursday evening, Rattle's priority in conducting Brahms was primarily one of coordination.  As I used to be told, "You do not teach your grandmother how to suck eggs."  The Berliner Philharmoniker has been playing Brahms since the days of Brahms himself, and Rattle knew how to apply that legacy to its best advantage.  The same can be said of his approach to Wagner.  Thus, these two composers, so opposed in their musical perspectives, both emerged in the best possible light, each enjoying the advantages of his own merits, merits which have been presented by this particular ensemble to audiences around the world for well over a century.

November 15, 2009: The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra: a new season with a new conductor

Donato Cabrera introduced his first season as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra this afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall with a program that comprehensively displayed the breadth of the orchestra's capabilities.  The offerings provided both intimate and full-throated opportunities for the ensemble to present itself and contrasted the late eighteenth century of Joseph Haydn with Edward Elgar on the brink of the twentieth century and Christopher Rouse in its final decades.  The one risk is that Cabrera may have left us with the expectations that his is an orchestra that can do anything;  but, for all we know, those expectations may be realistic.

Perhaps it would be good to begin with the intimate subtleties of Haydn, even if his music, the G major "Oxford" symphony, Hoboken I/92, was not the first work on the program.  This was performed with a reduced string section, which Cabrera effectively balanced against a relatively rich complement of winds (flute, two oboes, and two bassoons), brass (two horns and two trumpets), and timpani.  First and second violins sat at the front of the stage, facing each other from opposite sides, currently the preferred seating for eighteenth-century composers, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and particularly desirable when the second violins have their own voice, rather than just reinforcing the firsts.

Having established his command over the sonority of the composition, Cabrera focused his attention on the phrasing, making sure that no gesture lapsed into insignificance.    Some of his tempo selections may be been more exaggerated than necessary:  His Allegretto for the third movement Menuetto (one of the ways in which Haydn's wit would twit the listener with a totally undanceable rendering of a traditional dance form) tended to come a bit too close to the Allegro spiritoso of the opening movement (which may have pushed the strings faster than they might usually play but not beyond their capabilities).  Nevertheless, this was a thoroughly upbeat reading of the score, which may very well have reflected the same mood that Haydn brought to his own performances of the work.

The program began with an exhibition of the Orchestra at its largest scale in a performance of Rouse's "The Infernal Machine."  This is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink perpetuum mobile driven at a truly "infernal" pace that, as Rouse himself put it, is "more than a little sinister."  Nevertheless, the work was an excellent complement to the Haydn symphony, since, for all of its "dark materials," occasional flashes of wit would streak by on the periphery of this dizzying roller coaster ride.  This included a passage from Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 130 B-flat major string quartet (which I swear had been previously appropriated by Giuseppe Verdi's Simon Boccanegra) and those notoriously brutal thumping chords that introduce the "Danses des Adolescentes" at the beginning of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps.  The Stravinsky connection was particularly appropriate, since this is the sort of work that demands that same attention to precision and clarity that always occupied Stravinsky's conducting.  Cabrera had clearly rehearsed this work well, because all instances of that precision and clarity were present, allowing the music to speak in the voice that Rouse had intended for it.

The second half of the program consisted entirely of Edward Elgar's Enigma variations.  As usually seems to be the case, the program book provided Michael Steinberg's "decoding" of the enigmatic titles of the variations, reflecting, as Elgar put it, the "friends pictured within."  However, since we do not know very much about who these people were, I have always felt it sufficient to treat the variations as a set of portraits, dwelling more on the artist's rendition of likeness than on who the individuals actually were.  The one major exception may be the "Nimrod" variation (August Jaeger, who worked for the Novello publishing house and assisted Elgar through many of his bouts of depression).  This is clearly a gesture of heartfelt thanks whose sincerity almost literally overflows the capacity of the orchestral ensemble.  It is such a powerful variation that I have heard it taken as a concert encore, as Yuri Temirkanov did when he brought the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to Davies in 2007.  The other variation whose context is relevant is "the one with the dog in it," "G.R.S.," which stands for the organist George Robertson Sinclair.  This variation is less about Sinclair than about his dog.  Here is how Elgar himself put it:

The first few bars were suggested by his great bulldog Dan (a well-known character) falling down the steep bank into the River Wye (bar 1);  his paddling up stream to find a landing place (bars 2 and 3);  and his rejoicing bark on landing (second half of bar 5).  G.R.S. said 'set that to music.'  I did;  here it is.

Dan has now been immortalized by a wooden carving on the bank of the Wye:

The fourteen variations of this composition cover a broad diversity of tempos, moods, and even durations.  Thus, in addition to managing the rich orchestral resources that Elgar specified, the conductor also faces the challenge of presenting the overall flow of variations as a journey, rather than Winston Churchill's notorious "one damned thing after another."  Cabrera's sense of both pace and flow was entirely appropriate to the overall theme of intense personal reflection.  We did not have to know the specifics about either Elgar or the acquaintances he depicted to appreciate the emotional significance of those acquaintances.  The spirit of reflection drives this music, and Cabrera knew where it needed to go and how to get the Youth Orchestra to take it there.

Alas, there are only three concerts in the Youth Orchestra season.  The next one will not be until March 21, followed by the final concert on May 16.  The good news is that the programs prepared for these remaining concerts are likely to be just as exciting as today's was.  It is really very encouraging to think that the future of classical music is in such good hands.

November 13, 2009: The Berlin Philharmonic presents Brahms in two guises

The first program that Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic will bring to Davies Symphony Hall next Friday evening, November 20, will be the same program that they presented on Wednesday night in Carnegie Hall.  The first half of the program will consist of Johannes Brahms' first piano quartet, Opus 25 in G minor, as orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg;  and the second half will be a performance of Brahms' first symphony, Opus 68 in C minor, providing a fascinating comparison of Brahms' own orchestral skills with those later conceived by Schoenberg.  There is a letter, frequently cited in music history classes, that Schoenberg wrote on March 18, 1939 to Alfred Frankenstein, then Music Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, that provides valuable background for understanding his decision to orchestrate this particular piece of Brahms chamber music.  In the letter Schoenberg enumerated three reasons for undertaking the project:

1. I like this piece.
2. It is seldom played.
3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings.  I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.

If nothing else, these reasons should allow us to appreciate how much the performance of chamber music has progressed over the last seventy years.  In Los Angeles (from which Schoenberg wrote his letter) alone, during the four years when I was working there, I had several opportunities to hear this piano quartet performed by both seasoned professionals and students at several different levels of development;  and none of them were "very badly played!"  Indeed, pertaining to Schoenberg's third reason, while all three of the Brahms piano quartets might be construed (as I have previously suggested) as "concertos for piano and very small orchestra," every performance I have heard in any city has always had a keen sense of balance between the piano and the strings.  I suspect that this is less a matter of my being incredibly lucky and more one of the prodigious progress of music education in this country!

This brings us to the second enumeration in Schoenberg's letter.  Here he states the two intentions with which he approached his orchestration project:

1. To remain strictly in the style of Brahms and not to go further then [sic] he himself would have gone if he lived today.
2. To watch carefully all these laws which Brahms obeyed and not to violate [any of those] which are only known to musicians educated in his environment.

Schoenberg probably wrote this letter in response to Frankenstein's impressions of the first performance of his effort, which took place in Los Angeles on May 7, 1938, with Otto Klemperer presumably conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  I know very little about the quality of the Philharmonic in those days, nor do I know what Frankenstein wrote (if anything) about the performance.  However, I think it would be fair today to say that Schoenberg fell short of his intentions as much as he did with his reasons.  Nevertheless, in spite of the weakness of his argumentation, the result is a valuable addition to the symphonic repertoire, not only revealing a side of Schoenberg that received little exposure but also viewing Brahms through a lens that can inform performances of the original chamber music.

Anyone familiar with Brahms' orchestral repertoire quickly recognizes that this music does not have a "Brahms sound."  Clearly, it also does not have the sound of Schoenberg utilizing orchestration to clarify the underlying structures of his serial composition;  nor does it reflect the experimental approach of his attempt in "Farben" to compose directly with sound itself.  Rather, the music is a reflection on the past, not only to 1861, when the piano quartet was composed, but to the early twentieth century, when Schoenberg was deploying the full extent of the orchestra in his Gurrelieder.  However, beyond the richness of his orchestral palette is the perspective he brings to Brahms, which may be as valid for the chamber music as it is for the orchestration.  This involves the extent to which Schoenberg has found extensive wit in Brahms' score.

There is no question that Opus 25 is the wittiest of the three piano quartets.  That deal is sealed by the madcap Rondo alla zingarese that concludes the composition and the almost-as-loopy parade that interrupts what would otherwise have been a typically reflective Andante con moto in the third movement.  However, that sense of wit can be found in some of the throwaway gestures of the second-movement Intermezzo and may even account for the mood swings of the opening movement.  If Schoenberg made these instances of wit more evident through his orchestration (and some may be surprised that Schoenberg did not shy away from attributes like "loopy"), then he has also helped all of us to hear them when they surface in chamber music performances.

Rattle's interpretation of the Schoenberg orchestration is now in the archives of the performances available through the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall, and it is probably a good indicator of what we can expect next Friday evening in Davies.  The Berlin Philharmonic certainly has the resources necessary to do justice to Schoenberg's rich orchestration, and Rattle manages those resources with a control that gives equal attention to Brahms' source and Schoenberg's conception of that source.  He has also clued into the that sense of wit that first emerges in the opening movement and is blatantly exuberant by the time we have made the journey to the conclusion.  It is a reading that is both spirited and sensible, going beyond any weakness in Schoenberg's own argumentation to the brilliant core of the music itself.

The Opus 68 symphony is not in the recent Digital Concert Hall archives, but one can get a foretaste of next Friday's performance through the recent EMI recording of Brahms’ complete symphonies that Rattle made with the Berlin Philharmonic.  Here one encounters another performance that finds the proper balance of the spirited and the sensible.  Particularly in the outer movements, this is a symphony in which Brahms lays out a few basic materials in clear statements at the very beginning;  and, having presented those materials, he proceeds to turn them around and explore them both individually and in combination through a variety of developmental techniques.  None of those techniques are particularly novel, but the exploration of the content still emerges as highly inventive.  At the same time Brahms engages rhetorical strategies through which those inventions are charged with expressive emotion.  It is all too easy for less skilled conductors to allow those expressions to deteriorate into mawkish sentimentality, but Rattle keeps their intensity under control by always holding them in line with the elaborate syntax of Brahms' structural relations.

Next Friday thus promises to be an evening when we shall learn new things about listening to Brahms.  Given the many opportunities we have to hear Brahms in this City, particularly his chamber music, those lessons are likely to impact future listening experiences.  Tickets are available at the San Francisco Symphony Box Office at Davies Symphony Hall or may be ordered by phone at 415-864-6000 or through the events page on the San Francisco Symphony Web site.

November 12, 2009: Full disclosure

There are many reasons to be disappointed that, due to a medical emergency, Gautier Capuçon had to cancel his appearance at Davies Symphony Hall to perform Robert Schumann's cello concerto (Opus 129 in A minor) with the San Francisco Symphony under the baton of Semyon Bychkov.  However, there may be just as many reasons to be pleased with the decision to replace the Schumann concerto with two very familiar works by Maurice Ravel, the 1910 orchestral version of the "Pavane pour une Infante Défunte" and his "choreographic poem," "La Valse."  One of those reasons is that Ravel was greatly admired by Henri Dutilleux, whose "Métaboles" began the program.  Born in 1916, it would be fair to characterize Dutilleux as part of the "post-Ravel" generation.  His sense of orchestration clearly reflects the influence of Ravel, along with that of Claude Debussy, Béla Bartók, and Igor Stravinsky;  but his was also a generation significantly influenced by Anton Webern, particularly in the period following the Second World War.  "Métaboles" is a score that goes beyond Ravel's most extensive instrumentations to capture both the visceral qualities of Bartók and Stravinsky and a cerebral striving for new approaches to structural organization.  While Ronald Gallman's program note suggested this Dutilleux' title could be translated as "metamorphoses," it is clear from Dutilleux' own remarks about "interior evolution" as a structural strategy that a literal translation as the adjective "metabolic" is probably more appropriate.  The work begins with the "incantation" of a seed-like motif that "metabolizes" within a series of environments denoted by the section titles "Linear," "Obsessive," "Torpid," and "Flamboyant," the final denoting the ultimate flowering of that initial seed.

There are two other sources, both of whom approached the emergence of the fragmentary in ways that share a "family resemblance" with "Métaboles," even if they have never been explicitly acknowledged in any studies of Dutilleux' work.  One is Edgard Varèse, who had moved to the United States by the time Dutilleux was born but who clearly was concerned with approaching composition in terms of fragmentary building blocks that could be assembled in different ways.  One could be forgiven for assuming that Dutilleux had been exposed to Varèse's music, was fascinated by it, but was also determined to smooth out its sharper dissonances.  The other resemblance is, I am almost certain, entirely imaginary on my part, which is that the "two-way street" relation that existed between George Gershwin and Maurice Ravel formed again between Dutilleux and Charles Mingus.  This may have had to do with the way in which Scott Pingel played the opening of the "Obsessive" section, since his bass technique serves him just as well in a jazz setting as it does in the San Francisco Symphony.  Dutilleux was clearly going for a jazz sound at this point in the score.  Since the work was completed in 1964, I can think of any number of Mingus tracks that could have influenced him.

As one might imagine, the "interior evolution" of a seed is a subtle and gradual process that demands considerable attention to detail.  Fortunately, Bychkov is the sort of conductor that not only honors that fine level of detail but also coaxes it from the orchestra.  Thus, while the score makes many demands on the listener, particularly the first-time listener, Bychkov knew how to present all the complexity of detail with a clarity that demonstrated how it all came together in a "big picture."  If, as a result, he has cultivated a desire in his audience to hear more of how Dutilleux approaches his work, then he has done a great service to both Dutilleux and all of us who aspire to be better listeners.

Dutilleux' "evolutionary" strategy is very much one of gradual disclosure in a manner that is not that different from Gustav Mahler's similar strategy that has interested me so much in recent performances of his first symphony.  That strategy is also operative in "La Valse," which I have previously described as a work of "images emerging from obscurity."  In this case the "seed" of the music is even more primordial, since it is little more that what I called the "obsessive presence of the waltz' three-beat pulse."  Ravel takes his own good time (and perhaps then some) to allow any "waltz music" to emerge from that pulse;  and Bychkov was masterful in holding back the orchestra to allow that waltz to "evolve" in its own time.  Once again this is a setting in which an almost insignificant seed ultimately flowers beyond our wildest conception of its potential;  and, given Dutilleux' interest in Ravel, I have to wonder whether or not the flowering of this waltz was a critical inspiration behind the "Flamboyant" flowering that concludes "Métaboles."

There is also very much an evolutionary spirit in the fifth symphony of Jean Sibelius, Opus 82 in E-flat major.  Here is music with a motif so fragmented that it barely has a melodic contour and is deliberately ambiguous about its pulse.  Also, in the spirit of the second symphony of Johannes Brahms, this is a composition that keeps you waiting for its first solid downbeat, although that downbeat is ultimately established at the second movement, while Brahms keeps you waiting until the beginning of his fourth.  Once again, the performance depended on Bychkov's skill at keeping the orchestra under restraint as Sibelius' own "evolutionary" strategy played out in its own time;  and, once again, the music ended with yet another dazzling exhibition of flowering emerging from the most modest of origins.

The one piece that did not fit this unifying pattern of evolving-into-flowering was the Ravel "Pavane."  This was a much shorter work requiring far more modest resources.  However, it is another instance of Ravel's sense of orchestration at its best.  It is a composition in which every note counts, not only for its contributions to melody and harmony but also for the orchestral color it contributes.  This is one of those works where the orchestral shadings are so subtle that they still remain beyond the grasp of even the best recording equipment, but there is no doubt that they were well within Bychkov's comprehension.  Thus, those who thought they knew this music from any number of recordings in their collection could not help but recognize just how "ear-opening" Bychkov's interpretation was.

Thus, if unfortunate circumstance deprived us of the opportunity to enjoy one of the most interesting of the current young cellists, Bychkov had no trouble providing us with a wealth of other inspiring opportunities as compensation!

November 9, 2009: A pivotal composition from the early twentieth century

XM Satellite Radio listeners who have been following the regular broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic on the Symphony Hall channel (XM 78) may have noted with some interest Vivien Schweitzer's review of this past week's concert, which appeared in Saturday's New York Times.  Almost the entire review concerned the second half of the concert, a performance of the "Lyric Symphony" by Alexander Zemlinsky, published under the full title, "Lyric Symphony, in Seven Songs after Poems by Rabindranath Tagore, for Orchestra, Soprano and Baritone."  This work will receive its first XM broadcast on November 18 and will probably be most valuable to anyone interested in the evolution of composition in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

As the above title suggests, it is useful to regard this composition as a pivotal work.  On the one hand, considered only in terms of its content and resources, it is clearly a retrospective reflection on Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in a variety of ways, the most important being that of a symphonic structure, each of whose movements (seven in this case, six for Mahler) is a song setting.  On the other hand the title suggests (quite rightly) an influence on the "Lyric Suite" of Alban Berg.  Berg not only dedicated this six-movement string quartet to Zemlinsky but also quoted from the third movement of the "Lyric Symphony."  Furthermore, as one of my teachers observed, the rhythm of the first gesture of the "Lyric Suite" is the rhythm of an utterance of the name "Zemlinsky," while the final gesture of the first movement invokes the rhythm of "Alban Berg."  Beyond these explicit connections there is also the fact that Zemlinsky was Arnold Schoenberg's only formal music teacher and was probably well aware of (if not intimately familiar with) Schoenberg's Gurrelieder oratorio.

Zemlinsky selected his texts from Tagore's collection The Gardener, which he probably knew only from a German translation of the original Bengali by Hans Effenberger.  Since radio broadcasts do not provide a program book, one may find these texts at their entry on The Lied and Art Song Texts Page, which includes hyperlinks to English translations.  In addition Brilliant Classics has just released the out-of-print Deutsche Grammophon recording of this work made in March of 1981 by the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Lorin Maazel with soloists Júlia Várady and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

This is one of those cases where familiarity with both the texts and a recording of the music (for which the Web site for the texts will be useful, since they are not included with the Brilliant CD) will enhance listening to the concert broadcast.  On the one hand there is more of an effort to organize the texts around a common theme than one finds in Das Lied von der Erde;  and, at the same time, Zemlinsky has sought out imaginative approaches to taking Mahler's rich orchestral structures to a higher level, while occasionally recognizing Mahler with reflections of some of his rhetorical gestures (most evident in Zemlinsky's approach to the conclusion).  The resources are not quite as massive as those of the Gurrelieder.  However, they certainly come close but are deployed with a transparency that neither Schoenberg nor Berg could command in their orchestral writing.  The result is thus as much an adventure in sonority as it is an exploration of a highly non-conventional set of texts.  Finally, this is a good season for the "Lyric Symphony," since Christoph Eschenbach will be conducting it with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall during the week of April 29, making for a rich set of opportunities to hear a composition that definitely deserves more attention.

November 5, 2009: Waiting for the Berliners (and waiting through Brahms)

There are two ways to acquire a foretaste of the music that the Berlin Philharmonic will be performing, under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, at Davies Symphony Hall on the evenings of November 20 and 21.  Because each evening will feature a symphony by Johannes Brahms (the first on November 20 and the second on the following evening), one may draw upon the resources of the new recording of Brahms’ complete symphonies performed by this ensemble and conductor and released on October 6 on EMI.  In addition, much of the material for both evenings is part of the subscription series in Berlin, which means that archives of the performances are available through the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall.  In this article I would like to concentrate on the material that entered the archive after this past weekend's performances, the second symphony of Johannes Brahms and the Opus 9b version of Arnold Schoenberg's first chamber symphony, the arrangement for full orchestra of the original Opus 9 composition for fifteen solo instruments.  Both of these works will be performed in November 21.

Somewhat in the spirit of the first sentence of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, each of Brahms' four symphonies is interesting "in its own way."  While much of the interest in the first symphony involves the way in which he uses extended introductions to the first and fourth movements to lay out, gradually and deliberately, the materials of the ensuing Allegro sections, the second symphony is almost an experience of prolonged waiting.  Each of the first three movements has "its own way" of shying away from, if not deliberately avoiding, the sense of a solid downbeat.  That sense does not really arrive until the first measure of the final movement, which then launches forward with certainty and determination, building up to a finale blazing in glory that is radically out of contrast with the spirit of the preceding movements.  The essence of the symphony thus resides in this particularly striking mood swing, and delivering that mood swing without succumbing to it is the conductor's primary challenge.

One can turn to either the EMI recording or the Digital Concert Hall archive to appreciate Rattle's approach to meeting this challenge.  It brings a uniqueness to the performance of this symphony that stands out among the many other interpretations one may have experienced.  That very sense of differentiation is enough to justify getting a recorded foretaste before experiencing the performance as a "live" experience.  Those who think they are familiar with this symphony are likely to be surprised by what Rattle has done;  and, if they are going to hear him at Davies, it would be better for the surprise to be a pleasant one.

The Schoenberg chamber symphony is a complex piece of work (with all the connotations of the idiomatic "piece of work").  It is also a composition that Rattle has internalized with such mastery that in the Digital Concert Hall performance, he conducts it without a score.  He recorded the fifteen-instrument version with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group back when he was Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra;  and I am happy to say that this recording is still available.  If anyone can tease a journey out of the harmonic ambiguities, melody lines that interleave so closely that the melodies themselves are likewise ambiguous, and rhythmic patterns that almost deliberately try to obscure the foreground with the background, Rattle is most likely the best man for the job.  I can personally identify one individual with a strong reputation in both composition and conducting (whom I would prefer not to name), whom I have seen eaten alive by an attempt to conduct this music.  Under the guidance of Rattle's Birmingham recording, I have begun to get a handle on how this music works;  but I am still awe-struck by Rattle's command of it.  Those who have never heard the work at all would do well to visit the Digital Concert Hall, even if just for the twenty-minute duration of this one composition.  The camera work for this performance does an excellent job in guiding the attention of the listening ear.  Even if large portions of the work remain opaque, there are moments that dazzle with a brilliance that will make the overall trip worth the effort.

Saturday's program will begin with the opening prelude of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.  This work does not appear to have been performed yet this season in Berlin.  A search on Amazon.com for Rattle's experience with Wagner turned up only a DVD of a 2007 performance of Die Walküre with the Berlin Philharmonic.  Personally, I am looking forward to hearing this prelude.  If Rattle can tame all the complexities of Schoenberg, then dealing with Wagner's rich fabric of counterpoint should be a walk in the park!
For more info: Sa

November 5, 2009: We wish you a non-standard Christmas

Now that the Christmas season begins after Halloween (at least as far as television advertising is concerned), I have begun my annual search for Christmas concerts that depart from the usual beaten path.  Two of these events take place very soon after Thanksgiving Day (the "old school" initiation of the Christmas season).  One initiates the Holidays with the Symphony series of programs at Davies Symphony Hall, and the other is a fortuitous programming decision on the part of San Francisco Performances.

The Davies event is the performance of the Christmas Oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach under the baton of Ragnar Bohlin, Director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.  The soloists will be soprano Malin Christensson, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, tenor Lothar Odinius, and baritone Anders Larsson.  As the Wikipedia entry makes clear, this work was not intended to be performed in its entirety on a single occasion:

The oratorio is in six parts, each part being intended for performance on one of the major feast days of the Christmas period. In modern performance, the piece is generally either presented as a whole, or split into two equal sections. The total running time for the entire work is nearly three hours. In a similar fashion to Bach's other oratorios, a tenor Evangelist narrates the story.

The first part (for Christmas Day) describes the Birth of Jesus, the second (for December 26) the annunciation to the shepherds, the third (for December 27) the adoration of the shepherds, the fourth (for New Year's Day) the circumcision and naming of Jesus, the fifth (for the first Sunday after New Year) the journey of the Magi, and the sixth (for Epiphany) the adoration of the Magi.

Indeed, if one wanted to be true to the spirit of the time, one of the cantatas (BWV 36, 61, or 62) for the first Sunday in Advent, which happens to be the date of the final Symphony performance, would have been more appropriate.  However, the six parts of the oratorio actually work quite well together in terms of a "narrative arc" of reflections on the Nativity;  and, as far as I am concerned, this music never seems to receive enough good concert performances.  So this is the perfect way to get the Holiday Spirit in gear.  There will be three performances, November 27 and 28 (Friday and Saturday) at 8 PM and November 29 (that First Sunday in Advent) at 2 PM;  further details can be found on the Web page for this event at the Symphony's Web site.

The San Francisco Performances event is a recital by Anonymous 4 entitled The Cherry Tree:  Songs, Carols and Ballads for Christmas.  Anonymous 4 is the four-woman a capella group with a name only a musicologist consumed by the Middle Ages could love, but for this event their repertoire ventures beyond the Medieval period.  According to the Web page for the event, the program will feature different settings of the Nativity narrative from the 15th through 17th centuries;  and, according to the press release, the music will come from both England and America.  This is thus likely to be a delightful "music history without tears" event, through which we can experience the evolution of music for unaccompanied voices over a two century period.  This recital will take place on one night only, December 3 at 8 PM in Herbst Theatre.

Nowel syng we bothe al and som!

November 1, 2009: The mysterious Hans Erdmann

Last night at Davies Symphony Hall I learned why it had been so difficult for me to find any information about Hans Erdmann and the score he composed to be performed at screenings of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated in the program book as "Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror").  In the introductory chat delivered by organist Dennis James before last night's screening, I discovered that only about twelve minutes of Erdmann's score has been recovered, not very much to cover a film that runs about one and a half hours.  Thus the statement in the program:

Score by Hans Erdmann, arr. Dennis James

is not particularly accurate.  However, the truth turned out to be almost as interesting.

James explained that he was in Toronto performing Francis Poulenc's organ concerto when the Toronto Film Festival arranged a screening of a restored print of Nosferatu.  The plan was to have a pianist improvise while the film was screened;  but, after seeing the film itself, the pianist gave up and backed out of the project.  James accepted the invitation to provide an organ accompaniment in place of the piano, and the story of his relationship with this film began.  Having had so little time to prepare, he worked with what he knew, which happened to be Poulenc's score.  As anyone who has heard the opening bars of this concerto knows, this was a pretty good judgment call;  so James got the job done basically by fantasizing over Poulenc for the duration of the film.  It was only later that he would encounter what little of Erdmann's music has survived;  and over the years he has concocted a score of his own that weaves Erdmann and Poulenc together with several other sources, many of which, such as the "Dance Macabre" of Camille Saint-Saëns and Paul Dukas' "Sorcerer's Apprentice," add to the generally French bias of the music.

As is often the case with projects like this, some decisions work better than others.  We should all thank the Scheduling Fates for putting Poulenc at James' disposal when he was first summoned to this task.  Played with the full force of the Davies organ, it immediately sets the mood for a "symphony of horror," thus liberating us from the tired organ cliché of the opening measures of the D minor toccata by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 565).  On the other hand it has become impossible to listen to Dukas without seeing Mickey Mouse and his army of mops (just as it is impossible to listen to the overture to Gioachino Rossini's William Tell with a straight face any more);  and the misfit of those spritely passages triggered a burst of audience laughter.  However, since the spirit of the evening had more to do with high camp than with film history, that laughter was far from the only instance and not particularly out of place.

That spirit was further sustained by percussionists Mark Goldstein and Todd Manley.  They were not responsible for filling in missing percussion parts in James' arrangement (even in the Poulenc portions).  Rather, they provided sound effects, following a tradition that goes back at least to the days of radio drama if not common practice in silent films.  (Most of the "Mighty Wurlitzer" theater organs have built-in percussion;  and James has considerable experience with these instruments, including the one in our own Castro Theatre.)  Many of those sounds had a comic side, which I assume was deliberate.  When it was a matter of enhancing the "symphony of horror" mood, Goldstein drew upon the electronic technology of Ed Buchla in the form of the Buchla Lightning Wands.  (According to James, Buchla was on hand to enjoy the performance.)

Some day some musicologist may finally turn up the entirety of Erdmann's conception for Murnau's creation;  until then, James has homed in on an alternative that is both suitable and delightful.

October 29, 2009: Beethoven and the Finns

Last week Osmo Vänskä began his visit to the podium in Davies Symphony Hall with a long overdue (by almost fifteen years) first performance by the San Francisco Symphony of John Adams' "Slonimsky's Earbox."  This week he began the second program of his visit with the first San Francisco Symphony performance of the first symphony (Opus 24) by his fellow Finn, Aulis Sallinen.  Since it was completed in 1971, that means that this composition took about 38 years to find its way to Davies.  Sallinen is far from unknown in this city.  Indeed, I first became aware of him through the concerts of the Kronos Quartet.  Perhaps we should take this less as a sign of negligence on the Symphony's part and more a recognition of just how large the repertoire of twentieth-century actually is.

If many recent Symphony experiences have been concerned as much with "the sound itself" (as in the long-overdue return of Edward Elgar's Opus 47 thanks to conductor Itzhak Perlman) as with the theoretical foundations of that sound in melody, harmony, and counterpoint, then Sallinen's first symphony provides an excellent opportunity to pursue that focus.  Indeed, Sallinen comes close to reducing those foundations to a bare minimum of motifs to better focus on the wide diversity of the voices of his instrumentation.  He even goes so far as to bring out inner voices that tend to play supporting roles.  Thus a solo viola emerges from his orchestral fabric, soon to be accompanied by the solo voice of the section leader of the second violins.  It is only when this particular passage returns that the duo becomes a trio with the addition of the concertmaster's solo.  As he did last week, Vänskä used his entire body to coordinate the full scope of both solo and ensemble work in Sallinen's orchestral fabric, treating the composition almost as if it were a landscape and he our "tour guide," there to make sure that we do not miss any of the striking features of that landscape.

There is also a tendency to think of much of the music of Jean Sibelius in terms of the landscape metaphor;  but his D minor violin concerto (Opus 47) owes much to traditional concerto form and solo virtuosity.  Nevertheless, it pushed conventions far enough to pose a major struggle for Sibelius.  After its first performance on February 8, 1904, he withdrew the work for revision;  and the work as we now hear it was completed in June of 1905.  It still has a somewhat unwieldy nature, even beyond the demands placed on the soloist.  While the revised version involved tightening up some of the initial excesses, the duration of the first movement is still on the same scale as the remaining two movements combined.  Furthermore, that opening movement comes close to the character of a single (extensively) prolonged cadenza in which the orchestral interjections sound almost occasional.  Since the traditional cadenza is supposed to involve improvisatory reflections on what the soloist had been playing since the beginning of the concerto, this structural strategy upends the very raison d'être of a cadenza, if not the traditional solo-ensemble approach to concerto form.  Many of those traditions recover their proper place in the second and third movements, but Sibelius never lets up on his technical demands on the soloist.

Soloist Vadim Repin commanded those demands as if they were second nature in how he would play the violin on any occasion.  His solo work in that extended first movement had all the qualities of a dramatic monologue delivered by a seasoned actor, while in the remaining movements he engaged with the orchestra through the more familiar concerto protocols.  Once again Vänskä was in complete control of the overall scope of the concerto, keeping the ensemble in its background place as Repin negotiated his "cadenza" material and then negotiating the interplay between soloist and orchestra in the remaining movements.  As was demonstrated last week, Vänskä has a gift for bringing familiar material into a new light that equals his gift for bringing unfamiliar music to light for the first time.

The remainder of the concert, following the intermission, was all about familiar material.  Ludwig van Beethoven's eighth symphony in F major (Opus 93, completed in 1812) was preceded by the "Coriolan" overture (Opus 62, 1807) as a "warm-up."  The works could not be more different.  Joseph von Collin's Coriolan drama, for which Beethoven's overture was composed, well represents the rebellion against Enlightenment rationality that emerged from the Sturm und Drang movement.  Beethoven never had a problem with short-changing either the Sturm or the Drang;  and Vänskä kept these qualities at the focus of his interpretation.

The eighth symphony, on the other hand, may best be considered as Beethoven's reflections on his past relations with Joseph Haydn, who had died in 1809.  This was music in which wit was valued far more than rebellion;  and one wonders if the steady (ticking?) pulse of the second movement was meant to honor the pulse in the second movement of Haydn's own "Clock" symphony.  As in Beethoven's early piano sonatas, however, "honor" was a matter of recognizing what the master could do and then trying to do the master one better!  Those early sonatas also figure in his approach to his eighth symphony through what I called "the rhetorical impact of the rest" in the third of the Opus 2 sonatas.  The silences in this symphony carry considerable dramatic weight, almost as if to let the resonances of full orchestral strength have a say of their own.  From this point of view, Vänskä's crisp approach to articulation gave each of these grand-pause rests the same sharp definition as the audible notes, leaving me curious as to how he would conduct a performance of the interplay of sound and silence in the second movement of the Opus 58 G major piano concerto.

The only down side to this program is that it will receive only one other performance, this Saturday evening at the Flint Center in Cupertino.  (The Friday 6.5 Series concert will omit the Sallinen symphony.)  The scope of this program covered almost two centuries, and Vänskä was clearly in his element in all of the way stations along that historical journey.  Once again I face his departure with the hope that he will be returning soon.

October 23, 2009: Osmo Vänskä returns to Davies Symphony Hall

The last time Osmo Vänskä visited to conduct the San Francisco Symphony, he opened with the United State premiere of the work of a Finnish composer (Kalevi Aho's Louhi), followed by an American piano soloist (Emanuel Ax) playing a concerto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  This time the program began with the first San Francisco Symphony performance of the work of an American composer (John Adams' "Slonimsky's Earbox"), followed by a Finnish piano soloist playing Pyotr Tchaikovsky's first piano concert in B-flat minor, Opus 23.  This complementarity was somewhat accidental, since pianist Antti Siirala had been summoned to replace an indisposed Yundi Li;  but the duality of the two events was somewhat fascinating.

It also seemed a bit odd that Adams' homage to Nicolas Slonimsky should have taken almost fifteen years to find its way into the San Francisco Symphony repertoire (and then under the influence of a visiting conductor).  Adams tends to be a favorite with Davies audiences;  and one can make a strong case that his subject for this short (roughly fifteen minutes) work was the most influential figure in twentieth-century music.  In The Rest is Noise Alex Ross would have us believe that the major "trigger event" was the premiere of Richard Strauss' Salome in 1905;  but I find his justification both too Euro-centric for an "American century" and too rooted in nineteenth-century tradition.  Just one of Slonimsky's many activities provides cause for his displacing Strauss:  In the summer of 1933 he was engaged to conduct the entire eight-week season at the Hollywood Bowl.  He took this as an opportunity to introduce Los Angeles to a broad repertoire of previously-unheard music, most of which was greeted with indignation.  The crowning event, however, was a performance of Edgard Varèse's "Ionisation," which was heard by a broadcast audience in addition to those at the Bowl.  The reactions were so negative that the event provided "an inglorious end to my conducting career," as Slonimsky put it in his memoir, Perfect Pitch.  Nevertheless, there was one person in the audience who was clearly inspired by Varèse's decision to compose for an all-percussion ensemble.  That person was John Cage.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Looking at all of the young faces on the Davies stage, I realized how few performers remain who have enjoyed the opportunity of hearing Slonimsky talk.  Adams had that pleasure and got to know the man in the last years of his life.  I heard him lecture a few times (including one event at which Cage was the featured performer).  He was always contentious, but his provocations were always delivered with a puckish style.  "Slonimsky's Earbox" deftly captured both the sharp edges of the man's wit and the playfulness with which he exercised it.  There is also a slightly veiled reference to Charles Ives (another of the composers that had so offended the Hollywood Bowl audiences) and a less-veiled acknowledgement of the bustle that opens Igor Stravinsky's symphonic poem, "Le Chant du Rossignol."

My guess is that Vänskä never had the pleasure of a direct experience of Slonimsky;  but he conducted as one familiar with the logic, grammar, and rhetoric behind Adams' approach to composition.  Coordinating an abundance of simultaneous activities is key to making Adams work, and Vänskä is a skilled coordinator.  He engages his entire body to maintain simultaneous control over multiple sites of activity, and he does this with a physical disposition that almost glows with love of the music.  We may have had to wait fifteen years to hear "Slonimsky's Earbox;"  but Vänskä rewarded us for our patience.

Following this "ride on a fast machine" (to appropriate some of Adams' own language) with Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto was definitely a move to "something completely different."  This is a concerto that it is so familiar that any performance needs some differentiating factors;  but those are factors to be found in the music itself, rather than in the company the music happens to be keeping.  For Siirala differentiation was a matter of moving beyond the familiar and bringing attention to the interplay of inner voices that tend to be obscured by more "athletic" performances.  This is not to say that Siirala was weak.  When Tchaikovsky wanted the piano to roar, Siirala could roar with the best of them;  but he took the trouble to make sure we heard the music between those roars, much of which revealed compositional expressiveness that we tend to disregard in the midst of all the bombast.  Meanwhile, on the podium it was clear that Vänskä recognized Siirala's approach and sympathized with it;  so he facilitated it with an impeccable balance of the orchestral resources against Siirala's more meditative passages.  This was, without a doubt, a fresh approach to an old chestnut, reminding us that there are always new ways to listen to even the most familiar music.

The intermission was followed by the seventh symphony in D minor by Antonín Dvorák (Opus 70).  Of Dvorák's four minor-key symphonies, the most familiar is the ninth in E minor ("From the New World");  but the seventh deserves as much attention, which the San Francisco Symphony has tended to give it.  The "minor mood" of this symphony is darker than that of the ninth, drawing more heavily on the lower registers of instrumental range.  While the Scherzo is a clear Vivace, the haste is colored with the melancholia of Sehnsucht, triggered by references that may (or may not) have folk origins.  That haste then culminates in an Allegro Finale that practically overflows with thematic material.

Here the conductor's challenge is one of negotiating the delicate boundary between control and abandon.  Again Vänskä was served by his whole-body approach to conducting, allowing his frame to embody a dance-like spirit for those concluding movements but always keeping the orchestral activity well coordinated.  The performance also fulfilled an evening of differentiated voices in which the twentieth-century American spirit was complemented by nineteenth-century nationalism from Russia and Bohemia.  This particular program will receive only two more performances, tonight (October 23) and tomorrow (October 24), both at 8 PM in Davies;  but the experience is well worth the listen.

October 18, 2009: Itzhak Perlman: violinist and conductor

The program for this week's San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall (whose final performance is this afternoon at 4 PM) listed Itzhak Perlman as "leader and violinist."  That may have been applicable for his performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's E major violin concerto (BWV 1042), for which he sat at the head of the first violin section (with his own music stand in front of the "concertmaster's stand" occupied by Alexander Barantschik and Nadya Tichman);  but the remainder of the program required a "conductor" in the full sense of the word.  Perlman set himself some interesting challenges, selecting Edward Elgar's Opus 47, an introduction and allegro movement for a full string ensemble and a string quartet of soloists, to precede the intermission and Pyotr Tchaikovsky's final completed symphony in B minor ("Pathétique"), whose opus number (74) nicely complemented Elgar's (at least for the numerologically minded).

As can be imagined, the Bach performance differed significantly from the one offered on Friday evening by Philharmonia Baroque.  However, if Philharmonia Baroque offered greater allegiance to the sonorities of Bach's time, Perlman and the San Francisco Symphony were far more effective in capturing the spirit of the "concerto experience" of that time.  The size of the ensemble was considerably scaled down to a "chamber" scale;  and, in his capacity as "leader," Perlman led the way through the many intricate paths of invention that continue to remind me why I am so comfortable invoking the adjective "radical."  The ensemble was there primarily to support him, and he directed with a clarity that could guarantee that support.  However, within the first few measures he was already exploring new territory (not the traditional approach to a concerto solo);  and the journey was entirely his adventure until the final cadence.  If this was the sort of performance that had more to do with the tradition of Jascha Heifetz than with Bach's "original intent," one could still take it on its own terms and enjoy the trip as much as Perlman did.

I have to admit that I was both surprised and disconcerted to learn that, before this week, the first and only performances of the Elgar by the San Francisco Symphony took place in December 1930.  I must confess to a bias towards this composition, induced by an orchestration professor who had us study every last note to appreciate the art of composing for a string ensemble.  However, beyond eliciting ensemble sonorities and rhetorical gestures that we recognize in other Elgar symphonic compositions, his concerto grosso approach of providing the solo voices of a string quartet not only reflects back to Bach's time but also provides an intriguing foretaste of his two subsequent major ventures into chamber music, the Opus 83 string quartet and the Opus 84 piano quintet.

For all my studies, however, this was the first time that I heard this music in a "live" setting;  and I was struck by the extent to which those sonorities take on an entirely new dimension in direct physical experience.  So many of those aforementioned rhetorical gestures are all about the control of energy, and recording technology tends to smooth over radical energy shifts while often masking the more subtle ones.  Also, as my once fellow Examiner Scott Foglesong observed, there is a physical reverberation to a full complement of violins playing a melodic line on the G string with forte dynamics that can only be felt in direct experience;  and for me that feeling is very much a visceral one.

Thus, as a conductor Perlman was faced with two tasks.  On the one hand he had to negotiate the tightly-knit structural architecture of this composition, delivering it with all of the clarity and coherence that Elgar had conceived.  At the same time, he had to "go for the sound," for which he was well equipped to do through his personal experience.  Perlman had no trouble rising to the demands of both tasks, and I hope that one of the consequences of his effective and stimulating interpretation is that the San Francisco Symphony will not let another eighty years lapse before giving this music another performance!

The Tchaikovsky performance was the only work in which Perlman faced a full orchestra.  Here, again, he had a keen sense of sound, bringing out many (if not all) of the subtleties in Tchaikovsky's rich orchestration technique.  However, there was some sense that he was running out of steam in the final movement.  This movement is a major challenge, since it is the ultimate gesture of pathos, gradually dying away in the wake of a march-like scherzo that busts at the seams with its explosions of energy.  The "sense of ending" in that movement is so strong that it is almost always greeted with applause, which makes the final movement all the more tragic.  That tragedy demands a sense of urgency, however;  and the absence of urgency in this performance of Tchaikovsky's series of descending motifs felt more like a sense of wilting away than the pangs of pathos.

Nevertheless, it was clear that, where both Elgar and Tchaikovsky were concerned, Perlman was far more than a "leader."  He was the conductor that these works demand.  He was also a conductor well connected to the capabilities of the San Francisco Symphony, and serious listeners had much to gain from the results of this partnership.