Weird-Ass Stravinsky at the SF Symphony

Please excuse the click-bait title but was having a difficult time coming up with a better adjective. Instead of the usual Firebird or Rite of Spring, Michael Tilson Thomas and the SF Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performed a trio of off-kilter, concentrated late Stravinsky compositions last week, and it was wonderful. The evening started with 1955's Canticum sacrum where Stravinsky played with Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositional style in a strange, jagged prayer with a huge chorus and a tiny orchestra bereft of violins and cellos. The baritone and tenor soloists were local oratorio favorites Tyler Duncan and Nicholas Phan, respectively, and they made the thorny vocal lines sound gorgeous. The chorus was an occasional, thrilling presence, but Tilson Thomas took the pace too slow, making it sound dirge-like. The work is more startlingly interesting when taken at a quicker, more disjointed pace.

The 1930 Symphony of Psalms, another piece for huge mixed chorus and a larger orchestra (but still no violins or violas), was given a virtually perfect performance, and the unearthly beauty of the final Alleluia movement sent most of the audience floating out of the auditorium. It may be my favorite Stravinsky composition, especially after hearing this.

After intermission, there was a non-Stravinsky amuse bouche, Haydn's Cello Concerto #2 with the young Oliver Herbert, who used to play with the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra, as soloist. Herbert had a sweet, flawless tone but is not yet at that interpretive place where music takes flight beyond the notes. The orchestral accompaniment was lively in the long first movement, but the performance started to drag in the final two, and made one wish for more Stravinsky.

Which we got, the 1945 Symphony in Three Movements, a 20-minute blast through a World War Two New Yorkscape that had enough ideas for a piece three times that long. The first movement had a few moments that amusingly presaged Philip Glass, while the second movement Andante played with a fractured tune that sounded like a similar refrain in Stravinsky's 1951 full-length opera, The Rake's Progress. The final movement is a rambunctious barn-burner, perfect for a composer conducting its premieres with various orchestras around the world, including the SF Symphony in 1946. The evening was one of MTT's better programs, and made me realize how much we'll miss him.