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Philistine Believes in Life After Love
We make sartorial comments about male performers too, don't go getting all sanctimonious on us. But the first thought that came across our -- granted, gutter stranded -- mind when Katia and Marielle Labèque came on the SF Symphony stage yesterday was: oh my, Cher has not one, but two twin sisters. What, the same morphology, the same long curly brunette hair, and some see-through lace top on tight velvety pants. Cher's lace would be much more see-through, much more, and the Labeque sisters must be at least a decade younger, despite their biographies being slightly evasive on the age topic. It really doesn't hurt when beautiful music is performed by beautiful people.
We said "twin" but the Labeque sisters are not twins, they are two years apart. They just play up the confusion with paired outfits and make-up styles, with Katia's bustier in black and Marielle's in white. Or the opposite, as we said, the overall blurriness is part of the show. Just to confirm we are the only ones worried about the sisters looking like Cher, or photographic negatives of each others, we googled these keywords. Nope, no one else feels this way. You'll read this keen insight only here.
We forgot about their appearance as soon as they started to play. The Mozart concerto for two piano in E flat displayed a symbiotic relationship between the two sisters, interweaving and exchanging their parts seamlessly and effortlessly. We found the playing just a tad dry for Mozart, which demands a joyfull looseness, but it was more than compensated by the perfect synchronicity at all velocity.
Picture of Katia and Marielle courtesy of their web site, www.labeque.com, and the other picture is Cher. What do you think -- separated at birth?
The Labeque sisters also performed Poulenc's Concerto in D minor for Two Pianos. This concerto has been performed only once by the SF Symphony, and it was in 1952. Poulenc, a French composer in the first half of the 20th century, part of the Groupe des Six along with Darius Milhaud or Arthur Honegger, has had a limited recognition.
The Labeque sisters, -- French themselves, by the way -- do make a strong case to change this perception of Poulenc: their intense, energetic, yet thoughtful playing converted us. The concerto is a patchwork of influences. You can hear a baroque choral, some Hispanic motives underscored with castanets, some heavy romantic influences in another instance, and some childrens' tunes (Poulenc actually wrote such tunes, which are still taught to school children in France, as this SFist can attest). There was a distinctly Mozartian theme which ran into a Stravinskian wall. All in all, not a dull moment. We were thinking of Shostakovich in a sunny mood.
Katia and Marielle performed the piece with a surprising physicality, a total engagement of the whole body in the more vivacious parts of the score. In the lighter parts, they imparted a dreamy quality to their playing, and in particular to the Balinese gamelan-inspired end of the first act. If you don't know Balinese gamelan, don't worry, we needed the program notes to explain it to us too. But the part of the concerto we mention is very distinctive, with its interlocked and repeated rhythm motifs in a beautiful piano duet.
We haven't mentioned the orchestra, led by Michael Tilson Thomas, which ably supported the soloists. They also played a Haydn symphony, conducted from the harpsichord by MTT. Ok, MTT stood in front of the harpsichord for all but twelve bars in the final movement, a lively presto, and, to be honest, he required a few bars to get in sync with first violin Alexander Barantschik at that neck-breaking pace. Still we're glad to have seen MTT as a conductor and as a performer, as we'll see him soon as a composer.
The concert concluded with Ravel's La Valse, dedicated by MTT to the retired members of the Symphony, who were invited to attend. We saw one of these retirees longingly looking at the 18th century double bass he used to play on, now in the hands of another orchestra member. The evocation by MTT of these "veterans" must have called to minds veterans of another kind, since La Valse was executed two notches too loud, as a bombastic, powerful, and a bit monochromatic piece, instead of as a waltzy ballet. The interpretation can be defended on historic grounds, Ravel's wrote La Valse shortly after WWI, when the zeitgeist wasn't much into 19th century Viennese insouciance. And anyway, in the words of one retired viola player: "it was a nice concert."
Katia & Marielle Labèque with the SF Symphony
Tonight and tomorrow, 8pm
Davies Symphony Hall
SF Symphony
Box office: 864-6000