Stephen Hough at the SF Symphony
On a program featuring a McArthur genius/blogger and the promise of ecstasy, it's the unassuming Finnish symphonic tone poem which proved to be the wonderful surprise of the evening. David Robertson, aka. Mr Orli Shaham, returned to conduct the SF Symphony in Tchaikovsky second piano concerto (this program repeats tonight). The first piano concerto is a mainstay of the repertoire, while the second is the ugly little duckling. The reason why? It is long, and impossibly difficult. We tip our hat for Stephen Hough for tackling it for us. Unfortunately, they did not quite pull it off: Call us hard to please, but you could hear the sweat going into playing those harrowing technical passages, and Hough seemed stiff, never embracing the musicality of the more melodic moments. We hoped for a more cohesive interpretation, more grace, but we were let down in between the reckless cadenzas which punctuate the piece. Hough emphasizes the beat by accentuating the note which kicks off the bar, which should make him a pleasure to keep in sync with, but sounds a bit rigid in Tchaikovsky.
Due to the length of the piece, it filled up the first half of the evening, and Robertson had to wait between the first and second movement to seat the late arrivals, cracking jokes to keep lose. "I just want everybody to get comfortable," he apologized for the holding pattern. Guys: if their is no amuse-bouche, no cute curtain raiser to your concert, don't be late, please. The reason why we don't clap between movements, it's not to give you more time to find your seat. Yep, we were grumpy. Luckily, the secnd movement featured delicious turns by violinist Sasha Barantschik and cellist Michael Grebanier, who were free to emote, without to worry about the next frantic run of chords up the keyboard. Oh, and Nadya Tichman saved the day, diving in a flash for Sasha's score when his bow dropped it to the floor.
Luckily, we were treated to a eye opening version of En Saga, the symphonic tone poem by Sibelius. The orchestra found its tightness, and produced Sibelius's weird textures: an exhuberant sonic magma of scratchy strings, which minimalists would recreate three quarters of a century later (as SF Mike astutely points out). Some melodic motifs hover over an ever evolving orchestration, with no clear tonality. It was absolutely captivating, a revelation for us.
It was the high point of the night, followed by Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy, which did not do it for us: sure, the orchestra had found its groove, but we were not in a mood for some epic painstaking Wagnerian build up, until the piece turns into big pompous walls of sound, an ecstasy culminated by a twinkling of harps. Some guy in the seats behind the orchestra must have felt the same way, as he started to stretch, his white T-shirt begging for attention: dude, wait for the seventh inning, you'll recognize the music.