A Journey to the Planets at the SF Symphony

After a month and a half of holiday music and playing live accompanist to popular movies, the San Francisco Symphony finally got back to playing symphonic music this weekend. The British conductor Edward Gardner offered a mostly British program, starting with the Overture to The Wasps by Ralph Vaughan-Williams, composed in 1909 for a Cambridge University production of the Aristophones play. It had never been performed at the San Francisco Symphony, but if you listen to classical radio stations at all, you have heard the piece because it has a couple of catchy, buzzing tunes. On Friday evening, the orchestra sounded top-notch.

This was followed by one of the mainstays of the Romantic violin concerto repertory, German composer Max Bruch's 1867 Violin Concerto #1. The composer was born in 1838 and had a youthful success with this concerto, but then he stubbornly stuck to the same musical style until his death in 1920, eventually becoming embittered by his treatment as an obsolete composer.

Still, composing a piece that will live forever is something, and this violin concerto with its achingly beautiful melodies in the first two movements is one of my favorite warhorses. It was given a decent performance on Friday by the 29-year-old American soloist Randall Goosby, though his coordination with Gardner and the orchestra sounded a little off, as if they had two different ideas for the piece.

Goosby has recorded the concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the recording has been praised for Goosby's cool, elegant playing. However, this concerto really welcomes a more romantic, heartfelt style, and Goosby's performance sounded a bit too recessive for me.

After intermission, we heard another composer's one-hit wonder, Gustav Holst's The Planets from 1917. Holst mostly composed on a smaller scale, writing chamber music, song cycles and one-act operas which aren't played much in the U.S., although everything I have heard over the years has been interesting. The Planets, though, is an hour-long work for a huge orchestra that consists of seven tone poems for the astrological qualities of Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, in that order. Though it has been plagiarized extensively over the last century for film scores, most notably by John Williams for Star Wars, the full work is still full of surprises, such as odd instrumental combinations like harps and basses bouncing off each other, a great use of the celesta, and a ghostly, unseen womens' chorus that vanishes into space at the finale.

Conductor Gardner obviously loves this music and he led the orchestra in a smashingly good performance, with a particularly fine outing by the brass. The piece is also a popular favorite, possibly because of the Star Wars plagiarism, so Davies Hall was full on Friday evening and skewed younger than usual, which is always nice to see.