The final subscription concerts of the year for the San Francisco Symphony took place last week before Davies Hall becomes all-Christmas all-the-time through December. It was a challenging program, starting with a 1906 Sibelius tone poem Pojhola's Daughter, followed by the two-year-old Violin Concerto composed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the evening's conductor, and topped off with excerpts from Gotterdammerung, the final opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Salonen, above right looking like a Finnish version of Seiji Ozawa in middle age, has been astonishingly successful over the last couple of decades, gaining praise in all quarters for his conducting while music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years and then further praise for his own compositions. The opening Sibelius was wonderful and made me wish Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony were playing something more substantial by the composer.
The American violinist of the moment, and a MacArthur Fellow to boot, Leila Josefowicz above has been playing Salonen's violin concerto all over the world for the last two years with the composer conducting. It appears to be an insanely difficult work for a soloist who seemingly gets about two minutes of rest in the entire thirty-minute piece, often sustaining the entire sound with discreet backing from the huge orchestra. "How do you memorize something like that?" my friend Charlie wanted to know. "And how do you enter this music? It sounds like it was written for Martians."
I didn't find the busy, glacial, strange music all that difficult, but it was way too dense to absorb on a first hearing. I should have listened to the piece on YouTube ahead of time (you can do so by clicking here). In any case, it felt like a privilege hearing a composer and original soloist performing an ambitious work live.
After intermission, we were offered three raw, bleeding chunks from Wagner's five-and-a-half hour Gotterdammerung, including Christine Brewer above singing Brunnhilde's Immolation Scene at the end of the opera. Though Wagner opera excerpts have been symphony concert staples since the late 19th century, it still felt strange listening to this music completely divorced from the context of the opera house stage, particularly since the San Francisco Opera had presented a stunningly good "Ring" production five months ago across the street.
"This is a concert version! It's supposed to sound different than the opera house, and besides, I prefer Christine Brewer's tone to Nina Stemme," Goangshiuan next to me argued, to which my articulate reply was something on the order of "Bosh!" For the record, the performance by Brewer and the San Francisco Symphony under Esa-Pekka Salonen was just fine, but they didn't even begin to efface the memories of Nina Stemme totally commanding the San Francisco Opera stage this summer, or Donald Runnicles conducting a superb San Francisco Opera orchestra in the same music.
On Thursday evening, just about everybody who was anybody was at Zellerbach Auditorium for a concert by the Berkeley Symphony, featuring the West Coast premiere of Verge by the Chinese-born Californian composer Lei Liang, along with the 1985 Piano Concerto by Lou Harrison, and the Sibelius 5th Symphony from 1919.
The guest conductor was Jayce Ogren above, who gave a short talk at the beginning of the concert about the sound worlds of the three pieces, and how much he loved all of them. The affection showed, particularly in the opening Lei Liang piece for a string chamber orchestra. The composer writes: "The 18 strings are divided into antiphonal groups: left versus right, front versus rear. They diverge into various sub-ensembles, quartets, and also appear as 18 virtuosic soloists. Near the end, they converge into a singular voice." Amazingly, you could clearly hear all of that and more in the ten-minute piece, not to mention the Mongolian overtones the composer had in mind.
The pianist Sarah Cahill above was the soloist in the ambitious, four-movement Lou Harrison piano concerto which the great, recently deceased local composer wrote in 1985 for Keith Jarrett. Though Jarrett recorded the concerto in Japan (click here), he hasn't continued to play or champion the piece which is unfortunate because it's a major work by a vastly underrated composer.
Part of the reason for that might be explained by a letter Harrison wrote to a friend after he finished the concerto, which is in the archives at UC Santa Cruz:
"When keith, despite my repeating to him many times that he only had to ask a foundation to help (or arts council or various friends), did not pay me a cent for my piano concerto with selected orchestra I was angry -- look at the writing of the last page. This meant that I was unprofessional, but it felt to me like castration. BM even called Keith’s manager in the last stages, to hear the reply “there was no contract, was there?” Keith’s long phone call requesting me to write for him evidently did not at all mean that one professional was asking work of another, despite his long talk about why he was asking me, especially, to compose for him. So- to cauterize the wound. I did learn from both concerti, though, that concert grand pianos are not instruments at all -- they are symbolic fetishes, just this side of the holy grail. The steinway company was nervous that I required kirnberger’s no 2 temperament for carnegie hall. it was allowed, though, and it was a pleasure to hear keith play my standard use of the tuning."
The music of Lou Harrison above strikes me as almost the perfect antithesis to John Harbison's music, which was played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra the night before. The wonderful English classical music blog, On An Overgrowth Path, reprinted a fascinating interview with Harrison by Joanna MacGregor, and this Q&A jumped out:
How would you describe 'West Coast' music? What would you say is its essence?
Well, there's no one 'is' about it. I have defined it as being freer. We're not bound up with industrial 'twelve-tone-ism' quite so much as the East seaboard is, and also we're not afraid out here if something sounds pretty. I don't see that increased complexity is any solution at all.
Harrison also described the wisdom he gleaned from Mr. Twelve-Tone-ism himself, Arnold Schoenberg, when the latter was his teacher in Los Angeles:
"From Schoenberg, oddly enough, I learned simplicity. I got myself into a corner one day, so I took the problem to him. He extricated me by saying, 'Only the salient. Only the important. Don't go any further. Just do what is going ahead and in its most salient form.' In short, no complications - strip it. I've sometimes wondered whether, when I write a Balungan for a Javanese gamelan for only five or seven notes, it might have something to do with Schoenberg's admonition. When I left he said that I was not to study with anybody, that I didn't need that. He said, 'Study only Mozart'."
The piano concerto starts with a long allegro that sounds almost like Virgil Thomson or Aaron Copland at their most traditional with an Asian tinge to its sound, partly because of the "just intonation" of the specially tuned piano. The second movement "Stampede" is a thrillingly virtuosic duet for the piano and percussion, here played principally by Ward Spangler who was sensationally good. This music didn't sound influenced by jazz so much as it is jazz with an infusion of Indonesian gamelan. The short third movement was a case study in not being afraid of music which sounds simple and pretty, and the even shorter final movement was another piano and percussion duet that was so beautiful and energetically rhythmic that its sudden end was almost jarring.
The performance by both Sarah Cahill and the small orchestra was fabulous, and in a more perfect world, major orchestras all over the globe would be retuning a grand piano to "Kirnberger No. 2" and inviting Cahill to play what should be a standard work in the modern repertory. The concerto, in fact, has never been played by the San Francisco Symphony in the 25 years since it was written, which is something of a disgrace that could easily be rectified, particularly since music director Tilson Thomas was a friend of the composer.
The Sibelius Fifth Symphony in the second half of the concert was less satisfying. The strings were as superb as they had been all evening, but the winds and brass were off-pitch enough times that the quivering, climactic Sibelius sound world was more discordant than written. The conducting by Ogren was fine, and it was obvious he understood and loved the music, but the performance was a reminder that musicians like Mark Inouye at the San Francisco Symphony and Elizabeth Rowe at the Boston Symphony get paid the big bucks for a reason.
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.
