The San Francisco Symphony played Prokofiev's popular Lieutenant Kije Suite last week under the debuting Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko (bottom photo in this post), who looked like a matinee idol direct from Central Casting. His music making was pretty good, too, especially in the 20-minute Prokofiev suite fashioned from an early Soviet film score, which you have probably heard whether you know it or not, since the tunes have been reused in countless advertisements and as the score for the 1957 Alec Guinness film, The Horse's Mouth.
The original 1934 movie is an absurdist satire on the late 18th century Russian Emperor Paul I, who adored Prussian militarism and drove everyone insane during a six-year reign until he was assassinated by his own military officers in 1801. Through a series of spelling errors, a non-existent Lieutenant Kije is mistakenly created by the military bureaucracy. This invisible lieutenant is then offered as a scapegoat for waking the emperor from a sound sleep, publicly flogged with 100 lashes, sent to Siberia, rehabilitated and promoted to general, married off to a Princess, and finally put into a coffin, all without assuming corporal form. You can see the subtitled movie on YouTube, and it's fascinating to hear how the Prokofiev music is used before it was refashioned, particularly the famous troika which turns out to be a Russian drinking song about the heart of a woman being like a roadside inn, with traffic coming and going at all hours of the day and night.
The great violinist Gidon Kremer, above left, then joined the orchestra for an obscure 1908 Bartok violin concerto that he wrote while infatuated with a young violinist named Stefi Geyer. She stopped all communication with Bela after he wrote her a long cri de coeur about his personal philosophy of atheism. Bartok still sent the concerto on to Geyer and the score sat in a drawer unperformed until 1958, a year after Stefi's death. It's a thorny piece, almost a violin sonata with occasional orchestral accompaniment through the first half of the slow opening movement, which was marred by a Thursday evening Davies Hall crowd that often sounded like a tuberculosis ward. Still, I'm glad to have heard it, especially in a performance as persuasive as Kremer's.
The Paris-based Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho is in the Bay Area for over a month giving a series of lectures at UC Berkeley, and the musical community has stepped up with a series of concerts featuring her compositions. Last Monday it was the the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble at the SF Conservatory, which began with a fascinating interview of Kaija by Kate Sheeran, who is Provost and Dean at the school.
Saariajo talked about studying to be a singer and arriving for a recital where not a note would come out of her mouth. "I think my body was telling me this wasn't the path I was supposed to be on. Soon after, I became a composer, it's one of those decisions that chooses you, usually around your early twenties," she noted, rather as if it was the onset of schizophrenia. She went to the Conservatory in Helsinki, but got tired of being the one "girl composer" and went to Germany to study, which opened a new world even though she felt stifled by the strict serialism dogma of her instructors. She then encountered the music of French "spectral" composers like Gerard Grisey and joined them in Paris in the early 1980s to work on music that combined acoustic and electronic elements at IRCAM.
"The computers were huge, taking up whole walls, and they were very slow. You'd finish a bit of work, put it into the computer, go to a movie, return and program a bit more, then go to sleep, and return when it was finished." Another turning point came with her discovery by director/impresario Peter Sellars who put her together with the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf to write operas, rather like Sellars joined John Adams and Alice Goodman for Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. "Amin and I were very polite and formal when we first started working together [they've created four operas]. The biggest challenge was that Amin is a novelist and not used to deadlines, whereas I had to have a piece done for a set performance date, but we now work closely and well together."
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble concert was titled With You in Mind, referring to the fact that all the pieces were written for particular performers to play. The evening started with a world premiere by Oakland composer John MacCallum for Stacey Pelinka on flute and Leighton Fong on cello, enhanced with electronics. It was a short, interesting work that was eventually overshadowed by Saariaho's piece for the same forces later in the concert.
Pianist Eric Zivian joined bass clarinetist Jerome Simas for a transcription of Saint-Saens' The Swan, followed by a sequel where The Swan Takes Flight written by Zivian for Simas.
The first half of the concert ended with Poulenc's 1957 Flute Sonata written for Jean-Pierre Rampal who was sort of the Lang Lang or Yo Yo Ma of the 1950s through 1970s. The sonata was once ubiquitous on classical music stations, and is one of Poulenc's most successful pieces. Stacey Pelinka did a fine job playing the flute, but Eric Zivian pounded the piano accompaniment so loudly that the music was destroyed.
Two of Kaija Saariaho's most trusted collaborators in Paris are the cellist Anssi Karttunen and the flautist Camilla Holtenga, who have both appeared at UC Berkeley in concerts surrounding Saariaho's residency. On Monday, it was cellist Leighton Fong playing Sept papillons, seven miniatures characterizing butterflies in motion. They were incredible, and so was the performance. Saariaho has a form of synaesthesia, where music triggers her senses into colors, tastes, and touch. Listening to Sept papillons you could almost do the same.
This was followed by the short Miroirs for flute and cello, which was originally written for a CD-ROM that allows you to recompose the piece yourself "by combining pre-defined fragments." It would have been fun to hear a couple of different versions, but the Saariaho template was rich and fun. I didn't stay for the Brahms Clarinet Trio because I was afraid Zivian would play the piano too loud again, and according to Stephen Smoliar, everything was fine until the final movement when Zivian did just that.
Susanna Mälkki started her second week of guest conducting the San Francisco Symphony last Thursday in a program that contained highs and lows. The curtain raiser was the 1998 Alma III: Soma, a ten minute piece for huge orchestra by the contemporary Finnish composer Jukka Tiensuu which was marvelous. In the program notes, Jeanette Yu mentions that "since the 1980s, Tiensuu has refrained from providing program notes and does not conduct interviews...[An admirer relates that] Tiensuu is trying to grant his audience the full joy and responsibility of reception." Let's just say that the music was bright, sparkling and delicate at the same time, sounding a bit like an aural version of the aurora borealis.
This was followed by Simon Trpceski playing Chopin's 1830 Piano Concerto #1, which the Polish composer wrote when he was 20 years old before his exile in France. In the program notes by James Keller, he points out that "received opinion" early in the 20th century was that this was "not Chopin at his very best," and then makes a spirited defense of the concerto. Since I have nothing but admiration for Chopin's piano music, I'm sorry to agree with received opinion, but this concerto is a huge bore, and its 40 minutes duration felt like four hours.
After intermission Mälkki conducted Sibelius' 1919 Fifth Symphony in a perfect performance. After listening obsesively as a teenager to a Bernstein recording of the symphony, I have heard the piece played live four or five times conducted by everyone from a young Simon Rattle to an old Semyon Bychkov, and they all managed to get it wrong. The symphony needs to be be filled with tension from beginning to end, and many conductors get mired in the beautiful byways rather than letting the music propel itself. Mälkki and the San Francisco Symphony sounded even better than that old Bernstein recording, and it was a complete joy to hear the piece live, played right, at last.
