Finland Station at the San Francisco Symphony

Last week's San Francisco Symphony program was devoted to Finland and Russia, with Finnish conductor Osmo Vanska conducting Minea by Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, followed by music by Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

Minea was written in 2008 for the Minnesota Orchestra where Vanska is the Music Director, and was meant to evoke the city of Minneapolis, but if you were given twenty guesses about which American city this music was meant to portray, the chances are that Minneapolis would probably not be one of them. The twenty-minute work for large orchestra builds to a loud climax about halfway through, and then just gets louder for the next half. Though I liked the bongo drums that kept popping up, Minea mostly sounded like particularly bombastic film music.



The Prokofiev First Violin Concerto, with the composer at his most gentle and lyrical, came as a welcome relief. Hilary Hahn, in one of the most beautiful concert gowns ever seen at Davies Hall, gave an amazing performance of the upside-down concerto which starts off ethereal and dreamy in the opening movement, turns spiky in what is usually the slow movement, and then drifts off softly and beautifully in the third.



Hahn has been commissioning 27 contemporary composers to write new encore pieces for the violin, which she has begun playing around the world. On Thursday afternoon, she played a new piece by Nico Muhly, and on Friday evening it was Tina Davidson and J.S. Bach. On the Saturday evening we attended, it was the turn of composer Lera Auerbach, whose encore piece didn't make much of an impression.



The second half of the concert was devoted to Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, which I heard for the first time when the Cleveland Symphony brought it as part of its West Coast tour. At the time, I wrote that the Clevelanders' playing of the long, slow first movement was beyond compare, but that they didn't seem to get the wild, rhythmic pulses of the two short final movements.

With the San Francisco Symphony, the opposite was true. They played the first movement very well indeed but it didn't quite take one to the holy places where Cleveland had journeyed. San Francisco's playing of the final movements, though, was everything that the Cleveland performance was not: rhythmically precise, brilliantly fun, surprising and sarcastic all at once. So between the two orchestras, I have now heard a perfect Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.

Behind The Iron Curtain at the SF Symphony

This week's program at the San Francisco Symphony was wonderful. The guest conductor Ingo Metzmacher annually arrives with fairly obscure music programs and makes a case for the music through beautiful performances. Last year he conducted Stravinsky's "Orpheus" and a Mozart "Mass in C Minor." The year before that he came with a full-length, fascinating Schumann oratorio about fairies.



This year he programmed Ligeti's 1974 tone cluster poem written for music director Seiji Ozawa and the San Francisco Symphony entitled none other than "San Francisco Polyphony."



It has only been played here once since its premiere, and that was twenty years ago, so it was a more than welcome return. It's beautiful, difficult, fascinating music written by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century specifically for this city's symphony, and the ensemble is so technically adept these days, that the music sounded both insanely hard and simultaneously like child's play for the orchestra. As my friend Charlie (above) stated, they really should play it live once every couple of years and maybe it will become a perfect corollary to Jeannette MacDonald warbling "San Francisco" as a civic theme song.



Also on the program was one of Bartok's last compositions, his Third Piano Concerto, which he wrote to be a popular success so his wife wouldn't starve in New York after he died in 1945. I didn't know the work at all so it came as a revelation, my favorite new Bartok piece after the "Concerto for Orchestra" written around the same time. Kosman in the "Chronicle" and a few friends weren't that impressed with the performance on Thursday, so Helene Grimaud and the orchestra were either massively better on Friday or I was just in the mood. The performance struck me as extraordinary.



By perfect chance, all the cool musical cogniscenti of the Bay Area had consulted the same astrological chart and seemed to be in attendance on Friday evening, including Sid Chen from "The Standing Room" (click here) who is studying jazz singing and finding it outrageously difficult.



Also attending was Patrick Vaz, who writes the cultural essay blog "Reverberate Hills" (click here) who was attending on his first press ticket with yours truly, and the fact that the seats were so awesome put us both into a bit of a Wayne and Garth haze. The Shostakovich Sixth Symphony after intermission did nothing to dispel my ambivalence about the composer, which basically boils down to loving the Bad Boy Shostakovich ("Lady Macbeth," the First Piano Concerto, a bunch of other music) and being bored by the tragic and serious Shostakovich. The Sixth Symphony couldn't have been a better demonstration, in fact, with its long, sad first movement (spiked by a rhythmic cougher in the audience for its final hushed notes) and the two final movements which couldn't have been more amusing and lively. The orchestra played great throughout.

The Cleveland Symphony On Tour

The parade of major American orchestras touring through Davies Hall in honor of the San Francisco Symphony's centennial continued this week, with a two-night stand by the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra under their controversial music director, the 51-year-old Austrian, Franz Welser-Möst above.

His biography, according to Wikipedia, includes this detail: "In 1985, Möst assumed the stage name Welser-Möst on suggestion of his mentor, Baron Andreas von Bennigsen of Liechtenstein, thus paying homage to the city of Wels where he grew up. In 1986, he was adopted by von Bennigsen. In 1992, Welser-Möst married von Bennigsen's former wife, Angelika." This all sounds perilously close to a parody of a Luchino Visconti film.

When Franz Welser-Möst became the conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the early 1990s, the British press anointed him "Frankly, Worse Than Most," which has to be the unkindest classical music nickname since Monsterfat Cowbelly. In Cleveland over the last ten years, there has been further controversy, including the removal of Cleveland Plain-Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg from the symphony beat in 2008 after one too many swipes in the newspaper at Welser-Möst.



Sunday evening's concert in Davies Hall turned out to be quite wonderful, though it started dully with Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3, The Scottish. The sound of the orchestra, in particular its strings, was amazingly beautiful, but the interpretation was way too Germanic and unvarying for my tastes. "Ponderous" is not a word I associate with Mendelssohn, but it's the best description of the performance I can come up with, which lacked both humor and poetry.



One of the incidental pleasures of the concert was running into everybody at intermission, including the Westphal brothers, Janos Gereben, Charlise the Opera Tattler above, and composer Luiciano Chessa. Most of us were there for the newer music, starting with Orion by the 58-year-old Finnish composer, Kaija Saariaho. She wrote it for the Cleveland Symphony ten years ago, before embarking on an ambitious trio of operas over the last decade. It's a weird, gorgeous, three-movement piece that often sounds like outer space music, with extreme dynamic contrasts, from the quietest to the loudest and the busiest to the sparest, co-existing comfortably side by side. The battery of percussionists running around the back of the stage were amusing to watch and sensationally good to hear, as was the entire orchestra.



The final piece was a Shostakovich symphony I had never heard before, the Sixth. The symphony is a strange duck, with a slow, contemplative first movement that lasts about twenty minutes, followed by two, short, rambunctious movements that showed off Shostakovich at his funniest and wildest. The performance of the first movement by Welser-Möst and the orchestra was beyond compare, with principal flute Joshua Smith sounding so lyrical it was hard to believe it was the flute he was playing. The final two movements were skillful and virtuosic, but they missed Shostakovich's sarcastic humor altogether.

The San Francisco Symphony is playing the same piece next month with guest conductor Osmo Vänskä, and it should be fascinating to hear what they do with the Shostakovich.

SF Symphony Youth Orchestra Triumph

My friend Janos Gereben has been raving about the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra for decades, but last Sunday afternoon's 35th Season opener was my first visit. Reluctance at attending an SFYSO concert always had more to do with concerns about the family audiences than faith in the performers, but last Sunday the phone video cameras were mostly put away and there weren't too many impatient younger siblings. (Note to parents: Just take the noisy wee ones out to the lobby if necessary and let the rest of the audience appreciate the high quality music.) Anyway, I'm happy to report that the 100+ instrumentalists ranging in age from 12 to 21 turned out to be even better than heralded. In a blind radio listening, they would be indistinguishable from any top-notch professional adult orchestra in the world.



What drew me to the concert was the debut of the organization's new music director, 26-year-old Bavarian conductor Christian Reif and an unusually challenging program for performers and audience alike of Henze, Sibelius and Shostakovich. Reif has been working with the New World Symphony in Miami for the last two years under Michael Tilson Thomas, and also working with the Tanglewood Music Festival. He addressed the audience at the top of the concert with, "You're probably wondering who in the heck composer Hans Werner Henze might be." Reif explained a bit about Henze and his music and the story of the 1966 one-act opera The Bassarids. It has an English libretto by W.H. Auden taken from Euripedes' The Bacchae, where the young King of Thebes is torn apart during Dionysian orgies by a band of intoxicated revelers that includes his mother and sister.



Reif didn't go into the composer's bio very deeply, which ranged from Hitler Youth thanks to a Nazi schoolteacher father to a post-war German ballet company conductor to a non-doctrinaire, Italian expatriate composer with a huge range of ballets, operas and symphonies to his credit before his death in 2012. He was also openly gay, and a non-serialist composer in the 1950s and 1960s when that was the established musical flavor of the modernist moment. Though his music may not be atonal, much of it is still elaborately complex and difficult for performers and audience. This 2004 suite for an outrageously large orchestra, expanded from The Bassarids, whetted my appetite and it would be good to hear more of it in the United States. (Click here for a wonderful appreciation of his music from The Guardian after Henze's death.) The performance by the SFS Youth Orchestra was impeccable, precisely overwrought and delicate in equal measures.



The Sibelius Violin Concerto wasn't quite as successful. The orchestral reading was wonderful, but the originally scheduled soloist had to withdraw, and former Youth Orchestra concertmaster Alexi Kenney was recruited to take his place. Kenney managed to hit all the notes, but he seemed to be missing the musical line in between.



My concert companion James Parr disagreed, and thought Kenney did a fabulous job, but he didn't have the sound and musicianship of violinist Ray Chen ringing in his ears from the previous evening like I did.



After intermission, the orchestra returned to play Shostakovich's 1939 Sixth Symphony, which is a weirdly proportioned 30-minute piece which starts with a long, meandering first movement Largo that according to the brilliant Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko is a mixture of Mahler and Mussorgsky. It keeps heading towards a climax and then dribbles off into soft flute trills and sad spaces. The final two movements are a short, percussive, wild Allegro and Presto.



According to Petrenko, "the third movement Presto is incredibly demanding – perhaps he was testing how far he could go back to the language of the Fourth Symphony at that point." Reif and his orchestra's account of the first movement wasn't very convincing (neither was the adult SF Symphony's rendition back in 2012), but the final two movements, including the incredibly demanding Presto, were smashingly well-played. I would happily listen to this orchestra play anything and wish the best for their new Music Director.

A Tale of Three Symphonies 1: Boston

As part of the San Francisco Symphony's Centennial season celebrations, six major orchestras from around the United States are visiting Davies Hall with two evening's worth of concerts each, including new music written expressly for their various orchestras.



This week was the turn of the 131-year-old Boston Symphony Orchestra, and I attended the second concert on Wednesday, which featured the Fourth Symphony of the contemporary composer John Harbison, the second Suite from Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloe, and Mahler's First Symphony. (Click here to hear the whole concert archived at Boston public station WGBH from November 26th.) I had never heard the orchestra live before, and was happily overwhelmed by the clarity of sound the huge ensemble produced, particularly the winds section who at times bordered on the supernatural.



The orchestra's historic roster of conductors over the decades have included Pierre Monteux (who later led the San Francisco Symphony), Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, and Erich Leinsdorf. Seiji Ozawa left the San Francisco Symphony and took over in Boston in 1973 where he remained for the next 29 years, reportedly overstaying his welcome by a number of years. James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera Musical Director, became the orchestra's first American-born leader in 2004, and the collaboration was reportedly a happy one until Levine's health problems knocked him from the podium over the last couple of years. Currently, the music director role at the orchestra is in a state of flux, so for this tour of San Francisco and other points south in California, the BSO asked Ludovic Morlot (the blonde above center and below right) to temporarily lead the ensemble.



The 37-year-old Morlot is a Frenchman who studied in France, England and America, becoming the Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 2004 to 2007, and has just started his new post as the Music Director of the Seattle Symphony among other appointments. He very much seems to be on his way, and from the evidence of this concert, the success is deserved.



The BSO started a cycle of performances last year of all of New England composer John Harbison's symphonies, which will culminate in the world premiere of his sixth symphony next month. Harbison wrote his first symphony for the BSO as part of their own centennial season thirty years ago, his second symphony for San Francisco in 1987, and the third for Baltimore in 1991. He dedicated most of the next dozen years to his opera The Great Gatsby, which premiered at the New York Metropolitan to "a very mixed reception," and then embarked on the fourth symphony in 2003 for the Seattle Symphony.

The five movement, 30-minute piece starts with a hard-charging short fanfare that almost sounded like John Adams in his Harmonielehre phase. After that, the symphony meanders all over the place, and while always never less than interesting and well-written, I confess to just not liking Harbison's music, which flirts with jazz and atonalism while studiously avoiding beauty or fun. Still, it was good to hear, and the performance was energetic and committed.



The short Ravel suite that followed was stunning, and even though this music can be boring from its oversaturation on concert programs and radio, I will always remember the sound of this fifteen minutes and particularly Elizabeth Rowe (above center) on solo flute morphing herself into a babbling brook in the center of a huge, clear ensemble.

The Mahler First is a favorite piece of music, but as the gentleman sitting next to me in First Tier said, "There used to be 11 classical music stations in New York in the 1960s when I lived there, and at any one time the Brahms First was playing on at least two of them. That's what is happening with Mahler's First these days." Morlot conducted the piece almost as if it was Shostakovich (a major Mahler admirer), with whip-snap endings to musical phrases, and though it's not the way I'd like to hear the piece all the time, it was an exciting, convincing performance. And oh, the sound of that orchestra.