The Philistine: Honi Soit Qui Mahler Pense.
The concerts of the SF Symphony this coming Thursday, Friday and Saturday originally featured, in addition to pieces by Webern and Ives, the Rückert Lieder, sung by Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson. Unfortunately, Mrs. LHL fell ill and had to postpone. San Francisco audiences are cursed, since they missed the pleasure to listening to her when she withdrew from the role of Kitty Oppenheimer in the exciting Dr. Atomic last fall, due to some other health issue. We feel for her, and look forward to her coming to sing at Davies. She will, soon, since the Symphony will record the Mahler songs with her as part of the on-going Mahler recording project.
This week's performances will instead offer Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka, and both the ballet and the Mahler recordings are related to the program of the week past, which we attended on Friday. That symphony performance opened with an impromptu tutorial on Debussy by Michael Tilson-Thomas, and when the maestro talks, we listen. Prior to playing Debussy's Les Jeux (1913), the score to a Diaghilev ballet, like Petrushka, MTT said: that Debussy thought it was "far too much work to write for orchestra." We paraphrase MTT, but Debussy did not need no orchestra, and was perfectly happy to play on his upright piano, but a new kid was showing up on his block: Stravinsky has had great success in Paris with Firebird (incidentally, recorded by MTT and the SF Symphony) and Petrushka, and Debussy "was motivated to pull all stops" to show off the youngster. Cage match! MTT admitted that Debussy could not "outdo Stravinsky in loud music" so his piece "surrenders to sensuality with a sense of playfulness and melancholy."
Gustav Mahler's picture MUST be in the public domain
We admit getting the melancholy part all right, but missing out on the sensuality and the playfulness in the rendition we heard. The orchestra, laid out in a recording-friendly organization which kinda confused our ears, with the first and second violins stage apart and a bunch of mikes overhead, played with a purposeful delicacy. It was the musical equivalent of feng shui: there was not a sharp corner. First violin Alexander Barantschik inserted a bit of liveliness in the proceedings with some pointed little solo interventions. The synopsis of the ballet involves a little ménage à trois. Diaghilev wanted three boys, says the program, but had to settle for a boy and two girls -- Matthew Bourne, please pick up the white courtesy phone. At the deliberate pace of the performance, whatever boy-girl action happened, it never went beyond first base.
The Ravel Piano Concerto in G (1931) brought more excitement. The baby-face pianist Stewart Goodyear -- he is in his mid 20s -- joined the orchestra. Ravel's concerto opens with a snappy movement, stealing jazzy riffs from Gershwin and watery arpeggios from Debussy. Playfulness there is a plenty, with harp arpeggios killed like ducks in flight by a gun-shot-like whip of percussion. Time will tell if Goodyear is the best pianist to come out of Toronto, Ontario, since Glenn Gould or Oscar Peterson, but he segued effortlessly between delicate trills, wild arpeggios and some heavy-duty left hand ostinato. While he was technically accurate throughout, he chose a very even interpretive tack which left us hungry for more. The adagio, for instance, a slow waltz with echos of La Plus Que Lente, opens with a piano cadenza: left hand goes ta-dum-dum, ta-dum-dum, while the right plays a sixteenth note motif with a rather restrained melody. And we were thinking: maybe this bland piece needs the accents of a Pogorelich -- or, since we brought up O-Pete, Monk -- to bring it to life. Goodyear's cooking, while tasteful, needed a bit of salt. The third movement recalled the flavors of the first, with a ragtimey clarinette and deep slides of the trombone, all following to a T the swingy beat of Michael Tilson Thomas. Still, Mr. Goodyear received such a standing ovation he obliged with an encore, a tutta bravura arrangement of Strauss' Blue Danube, and that waltz was full of spice all right. Wooohooo.
After intermission, the orchestra recorded a take of Mahler's Adagio of the 10th Symphony, the only movement Mahler could complete of the Symphony before his death in 1911. Michael Tilson-Thomas again took up the mike, and we were readying ourselves for his keen insight. He said: "Please stay quiet during the taping." We are impatient to hear the cd, though: the performance was thoughtful, and all the Mahler motifs were expertly highlighted: the little melodic steps jumping a big interval into the chord resolution, the haunting melodies, with magnificent viola and cello (Michael Grebanier in particular) sections doing the heavy lifting, a flourish of horns towards the end with the longest trumpet note ever, by, we believe, Jeff Lungs of Steel Biancalana. Whatever little balance imperfections there were in the performance can be smoothed out in the post-processing.
The concert concluded with Wagner's Siegfried's Rhine journey from Götterdämmerung (1874), an excellent piece to let loose your horn section. We were worried for a second that one French horn in particular was a bit too loose, rushing off the stage in the middle of the performance. We checked our watch: there was two hours till the last BART, why such a hurry to leave? Then the sound of a far away horn came from backstage, calling out all hound packs to go hunt some foxes. Wagner: what a prankster. The piece also shattered our dream to ever perform with a world class symphonic orchestra: the person manning the triangle was also assigned xylophone duties, which he handled remarkably well. Maybe we can learn to play the gong.
This week performance of Ives, Webern and Stravinsky at Davies Symphony Hall:
info here
Box office: (415) 864-6000.
Concert Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 8pm.