San Francisco Classical Voice

Vladimir Feltsman

To the casual eye, Wednesday's San Francisco Symphony program had an odd shape, with two symphonies sharing the first half and a lone concerto on the second. But in fact the concert order made perfect sense. If the evening still had the feel of a mixed bag, the blame must lie more with the unevenness of the performances than with the planning of the program.

Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony was the standout. Expected, after the end of the Second World War, to produce a triumphal, grandiloquent Ninth, preferably choral, Shostakovich instead brought forth this quizzical, brief, and apparently modest instrumental work. The modern habit of rummaging through Shostakovich's scores looking for veiled dissident messages can easily degenerate into an arid game, but this performance presented a powerful case for taking the Ninth at more than face value.

The almost idiotically cheerful material that pervades the symphony's three fast movements soon took on an edge of unnatural determination, even hysteria. Over the course of the first movement, the string playing grew fierce and desperate; guest concertmaster Michael Ludwig's solo skirted the limit of control. The two-note trombone figure that several times interrupts the proceedings (bearing an officiously rattling snare drum in its wake) came to seem more sinister than comic in its boorishness. In the central scherzo a trumpet solo, played with all the blare and vibrato characteristic of Soviet brass, seemed to revel in its own crudeness.

Perhaps the most famous single passage in the disputed Shostakovich-Volkov memoir, "Testimony," is its depiction of the ending of the Fifth Symphony as "forced rejoicing." Tilson Thomas's performance of the Ninth was clearly calculated to recall that phrase irresistibly to mind. The atmosphere of the entire symphony was that of an attempt at merry-making stunted and shriveled by some overpowering anxiety. Only in the fourth-movement Largo is there room for open grief, and there, in a bassoon lament played with keening intensity by Steven Dibner, it knew no consolation. The finale merely played at striking up the party again.

Haydn's Symphony No. 21 received its San Francisco Symphony premiere Wednesday, a mere 234 years after it was written. It is a graceful and ingratiating work, a lighter sister-piece to the much better-known No. 22 ("The Philosopher"), with an exceptionally fine (slow) first movement. The performance was frustrating; so much care had been taken to get things "right" that what was still lacking was all the more keenly missed.

The orchestra was greatly reduced, with only two cellos and a handful of violas. There was a discreet harpsichord continuo. The string playing was lively, transparent, and, as in the first movement, often very beautiful. The high horn writing throughout was clear and confident. And yet again and again I found myself wishing for a more involved, less generic approach to phrasing. There was far too much mere repetition, mere iteration.

This is early Haydn, not without its harmonic and rhythmic crudities; only an intense characterization of every motive can really make it work. The second movement, for example, contains a bald trot around the circle of fifths that is nothing but the same two-bar snippet four times in sequence. A passage like that needs more than a generalized energy and enthusiasm to make it zing. There must be something as vivid as physical momentum carrying the music from one iteration of the sequence through to the next and the next.

What was missing, in a word, was gesture, the similitude of human movement. An eighteenth-century symphony is a play of gestures provoking, responding to, and anticipating other gestures. The Symphony's Haydn, closer in sensibility to architecture than to dance, passed up unnumbered opportunities for sheer musical fun. Tellingly, its one overt attempt at humor--a crude emphasis on one of Haydn's more delicate jokes in the finale--bombed.

After intermission came Brahms' sprawling B-flat Piano Concerto, with the Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman as soloist. The piece has a vexing way of reminding me moment by moment of this or that other work by Brahms--all of them more tightly constructed than itself. The impression of looseness was not helped, in this instance, by a performance that exaggerated both the rhapsodic character and the bombast of the score.

The concerto is, to be sure, a grueling workout for the pianist, who is playing nearly all the time against a rather dense orchestration. But Feltsman's playing often seemed unnecessarily loud and harsh. Where the music was more scherzando in character, he played with flair (occasional flurries of dropped notes apart), but his steely fortissimos were wearing. The Scherzo, where his thundering manner suited the music, and in whose Trio he brought a sinister ease to the pianissimo filigree, came off best. In the great slow-movement cello solo, his most challenging Symphony assignment to date, acting principal cellist David Teie once again revealed a warm and vibrant tone.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1998 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved