San Francisco Classical Voice

Running a symphony in suburbia takes a lot besides conducting, and Barry Jekowsky knows a thing or two about that. The orchestra in question is the California Symphony, which on October 22 opened its current season of four programs. It showed itself to be a well-picked, tightly knit ensemble. With the outlying orchestras all drawing on the same pool of freelancers, the auditioning and picking is half the battle. Jekowsky is evidently good at draw poker.

The Prokofiev Fifth Symphony (1944), heard at the repeat two days later in Walnut Creek's Lesher Center, enjoyed a sharp, crisp, and sonorous performance. It's a big work, even by the standards of Soviet music, and is one of its monuments. Tuba-driven, as is no other major piece I can think of, the Fifth, start to last, works the whole orchestra constantly, with no letup. And bottom to top, all sections of the California Symphony responded.

The first movement is about sweeping themes, and Jekowsky gave them full breath. The playing sizzled in the Allegro Marcato, with a Scherzo chase recalling the up-tempo liveliness of the town square scenes in Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet, written eight years before. While commentary on this work, stresses its affirmative and nonprogrammatic nature, the Adagio cannot be other than an intense memorial of the war that, in 1944, was still in progress, the inexorable slow beats pounding away. Strongly done. The big finale, back at double time, at a gallop, was struck off as the most successful, with Jekowsky and company bringing off a bold and bright performance. Frank Rank, clarinet, and Forrest Byram, tuba, were in the forefront of the impressive principals.

With his history of engaging unusual soloists, usually child prodigies, Jekowsky this time came up with a different kind of pianist for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1, in C — Awadagin Pratt, in a scarlet blouse and with his unconventional presence and pianism. Sitting low on a short, special stool at the Glenn Gould level but much closer to the instrument, his wrists below the level of the keys, he accomplished a clean, well-balanced performance with his tightly sprung, often-curled fingers. Whatever it takes.

The spirited energies of the work seemed to spring from Pratt, who constantly kept himself in the rhythmic pulse by playing along mutely, on top of the keys, with the orchestra. While this kind of focus might create tenseness in another, it did not impair Pratt's fluency and ease in the work's melodious Mozartean phrases and liquid passagework. Because his cadenza sounded far from one of the three Beethoven later wrote out, my guess is that he took off from one of them, incorporating ideas of his own.

Pratt's crowding of the rhythm of the Rondo, however, had a negative effect on it, missing its humor altogether. The cream of the movement is the delicious play Beethoven makes between the rhythm of the theme and a twist on it in the slightly different rhythm of a variant. Subtle perhaps, but crucial. Crushing the latter, Pratt blew the joke, winding up with two well-delivered movements out of three.

Jekowsky began the concert with a work of 19th century symphonic Americana, Jubilee, the first of four movements from George W. Chadwick's Symphonic Sketches. Chadwick was already a leader in the so-called "Second New England School" of composers when he composed this work, two years before he became director of the New England Conservatory. Clearly influenced by European styles, Dvorak's most importantly, the piece incorporates American folklike materials and is pleasantly evocative of another age, rich in orchestration and harmony, resistibly old-fashioned. Jekowsky might have found some ways to move it along, but the episodic nature of Jubilee may prevent that. It's nice to recognize Chadwick and include an American work, but it's still a period piece.

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©2000 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved