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.