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Can-Do Candidate

By Jeff Dunn

The guest conductors’ parade began last Thursday. Hugh Wolff, the first of six candidates auditioning through December to replace the Berkeley Symphony’s Kent Nagano, put his best foot forward with an intriguing program, energetic baton technique, and a vigorous interpretation of an oft-played classic.

That his foot was broken, that he came on stage on crutches, that he could stand up from a pine stool only when absolutely necessary yet could still, for the most part, project a sense of purpose and control with hands and arms alone, indicated that he is a worthy, can-do leader and musician. (He did not reveal the source of the injury during a preconcert interview with KALW’s Alan Farley. Was it a reinjury to the foot he broke in 1994, when he jumped off a stage in rehearsal to address a sound technician?)

An American born in Paris in 1953 (his father was in the diplomatic corps), Wolff has conducted many top orchestras and has served as principal conductor of the New Jersey Symphony and music director of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. He had already impressed me with his advocacy of Sebastian Currier’s fabulous composition, Microsymph, recorded with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, where he is chief conductor, which he brought to San Francisco in a March 2002 program.

Overstuffed Overture

Wolff began with the first West Coast performance of Overture in Feet and Meters, by Aaron Jay Kernis, a composer Wolff has worked with many times over the years. The title’s puns refer to dancing feet and rhythmic meter — the piece is, as Kernis put it, “a kaleidoscope, an overstuffed medley of many types of dances played separately and sometimes simultaneously.”

I’m a great admirer of Kernis’ work, in particular his Goblin Market melodrama, which Wolff premiered with the St. Paul Orchestra in 1995, but his overture seemed overstuffed indeed. There was more going on than seemed necessary, other than to challenge the Berkeley performers’ precision of execution — a challenge that was not always met. The music will undoubtedly sound better with repeated hearings, for it did have a fine melody in the second section, but the work seemed lost on the audience, evidenced by their tepid applause.

On the other hand, Osvaldo Golijov’s Night of the Flying Horses, next on Wolff’s agenda, was a big hit with the crowd despite its unusual bilateral performance symmetry. Over the piece’s three sections, an unaccompanied singer is eventually overlapped and replaced by the orchestra. Soprano Heidi Melton began with a lullaby in Yiddish, “Close your eyes / And you shall go / To that sweet land / All dreamers know.”

The orchestra then seemed to illustrate subsequent dreams induced by the singer’s suggestion. First came slow gypsy music, highly reminiscent of Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1. Then the music concluded with a depiction of what seemed to be the flying horses in the title. With best sellers (Oceana) on the Billboard Classical Album list, and pieces like Flying Horses, Ayre, and his St. Mark Passion, Golijov is well on his way toward replacing Philip Glass and John Adams as the most popular classical composer of the moment in America.

Loss, in Translation

The first half concluded with a Yiddish version of Dmitri Shostakovich’s From Jewish Folk Poetry, sung by Melton, mezzo-soprano Katharine Tier, and tenor Thomas Glenn. While all performed well, Glenn was a standout in the sixth song, “The Deserted Father,” and the seventh, “A Song of Poverty.”

Wolff advertised this Yiddish rendition of the piece as a longtime ambition of his. “I’m guessing,” he announced, “that this is the first time it’s been performed in the U.S.” (It has, however, been performed in Israel and the U.K., and commercially recorded twice.) Wolff went on to explain that the music fit Yiddish syllables better than the published Russian and it was thus more appropriate to sing it that way. He was right: The Yiddish fit right in and sounded fine.

To complicate matters, however, Shostakovich published the text in Russian and later altered it. Which is the correct text to use? With Russian, the themes of sadness and oppression that permeate the first eight of the 11 poems might be taken more easily to reflect on the plight of the Russian people under Stalinism as a whole, not just that of a pogromed minority. In the first Russian text for the third number, Shostakovich set, “Your father’s held in chains in Siberia / Sleep, hush-a-bye.” Later he had to add a new line, “Kept in prison by the Tsar,” probably to deflect a possible accusation that he was referring to Stalin’s era. As always with Shostakovich, meanings become a minefield, in Yiddish or Russian.

Worse, the Yiddish text, uncredited but presumably uncovered by the Israeli musicologist Joachim Braun in 1979, was printed in the program opposite a translation from the Russian text. This situation made for confusing disconnects. “Schlof, schlof, schlof” (sleep, sleep, sleep) became “Fussy Mummy and Auntie,” the actual Russian title of the second number. “Kept in prison by the Tsar” was left out of the Yiddish text, but retained in the English translation, and so on.

In general, song translations should be pretty literal, so that listeners can match musical meaning with words. If time or copyright limitations prevented this in the present case, it should have been mentioned in the notes.

After intermission, Wolff conducted Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in A Major, Op. 92. Steeped in the German repertoire during his service in Frankfurt, Wolff proved not only that he was a master of this music, conducting without a score, but that he could shed new interpretive light on it. The obsessive dotted rhythms of the second movement, for example, can all too easily devolve into a Bavarian slap dance. Wolff, with sweeping gestures and a faster-than-average tempo, turned the music into a graceful yet powerful ballet. While upping the tempo ran the danger of eliminating the respite of the “slow” (Allegretto) movement, Wolff preserved contrast by presenting the last movements even more briskly than standard expectation.

The players responded to Wolff’s direction, and brought off a whizbang performance that brought the audience to its feet, without need of crutches, for prolonged ovations. The can-do gentleman from Paris can-did it.

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Heidi Melton

Katharine Tier

Thomas Glenn

Hugh Wolff

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