Prokofiev and Dvorak at the SF Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony last week presented a Prokofiev and Dvorak program featuring Austrian guest conductor Manfed Honeck and Norwegian cello soloist Truls Mørk that looked wonderful on paper, but was disappointing in real life. Six years ago, after conducting a rehearsal of Prokofiev's oratorio from Eisenstein's three Ivan the Terrible films, Vladimir Jurowski gave an interview where he noted: ""Prokofiev is still being discovered. There are a handful of his pieces that get played all the time, but there is so much wonderful music that nobody knows." Case in point, Prokofiev's 1950 Sinfonia concertante in E minor for Cello and Orchestra, which I had never even heard of before last week's Symphony performance.

The three-movement work is a dense grab-bag of styles from Prokofiev's entire career, spanning his astringent modernism of the 1920s through his Soviet Realist lyricism of the 1940s, and to make the disparate elements work, it needs a great conductor like Jurowski who can make the most jarring segues in the composer's music sound inevitable. Manfred Honeck was not up to that level, and never resolved Prokofiev's tricky rhythms, so the piece sounded even more disjointed than it really is. Truls Mørk gave a heroic performance in the fiendishly difficult solo cello role, which barely allows for a break in the 45-minute piece, but there was a tentativeness to his playing where the work seemed to be owning him rather than the other way around. It probably didn't help that I had been listening to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich's version on YouTube all week. Rostropovich helped commission and shape the Sinfonia with the composer for its debut, and his version is both authoritative and astonishing, which is almost unfair to later cellists.

After intermission, Honeck conducted the orchestra in Dvorak's Symphony No. 8, which has almost as many recognizable tunes as his New World Symphony No. 9. Though it is played on heavy rotation in broadcasts from classical music radio stations, this was the first time I was hearing the symphony performed live, and was looking forward to it, but Honeck led a rendition that was loud, flashy, and bludgeoning.

The four-movement work is essentially pastoral, with one of the most beautiful slow second movements in the symphonic literature, but you would not know it from last week's performance. In James Keller's program notes, he writes: "I shall never forget [the Czech conductor] Rafael Kubelík in a rehearsal when it came to the opening trumpet fanfare, say to the orchestra: ‘Gentlemen, in Bohemia the trumpets never call to battle–they always call to the dance!’" Though the San Francisco Symphony sounded great, by the end of the evening, it felt like a bloody war had just finished, which made much of the audience excited enough for a standing ovation, but which left me feeling battered.