San Francisco Classical Voice

It was pointed out by a researcher in Scientific American way back in 1975 that the full range of available dynamics is woefully neglected by classical musicians. What Denève does so successfully is explore the many levels of quiet from piano to pianissimo, an approach that allows for great variety in repeated passages and makes the louder passages stand out all the more. Equally astute in Denève's rendering was his seeming knowledge of the acoustical defects of the newly renovated Lincoln Theater. The deep, flat stage buries bass and percussion in the rear. Sound bounces around inside in loud passages before emerging, making the brass sound as if coming from the other end of a long mailing tube. To mitigate the problem, Denève kept loud passages for predominant brass at a more subdued level compared to standard performances, only coming to full volume when the front of the orchestra, as directed by the composers' scores, could mask the mailing-tube sound with a more immediate presence.

The concert began with Ravel's Mother Goose Suite, the perfect foil for Denève's dynamic mastery. Fluidity and delicacy were subtly yet ravishingly nuanced in these pieces. Like the rest of the program, the choice of this suite as an opener ran counter to convention: no short fanfare, rushed overture, or bombastic contemporary work here. My only complaint about the performance was the excessively quick tempo for the Petit Poucet, whose main theme should float carefully and ethereally above its accompaniment, not be rushed across the stage like a parlor maid.

Next came not one but two concertos, the first a piano symphony and the second, after intermission, the familiar Sibelius violin concerto. Finally, for an extra 20 minutes beyond the usual two-hour duration dictated for concerts in some quarters, came a return to Ravel in his Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2. What a change, with plentiful variety — even though the four works were written within a time span of less than 30 years.

Szymanowski was already dying of tuberculosis when he wrote his piano concertante. In a period of remission, Szymanowski perhaps imagined himself as soloist in order to enhance his precarious finances, writing the piano part into a previously conceived symphony. In any case, joyful optimism pervades this sharply orchestrated work, with the piano ever-present yet rarely silencing the orchestra. The 37-year-old Polish-Hungarian Piotr Anderszewski was the soloist. As a winner of the Szymanowski Prize in 1999, he owned the music, negotiating its spritely difficulties with perfection and vigor somewhat in the manner of Vladimir Feltsman, but with more power.

With this keyboard wizard at his side, Denève's building of climaxes was heart-stopping, leading to unbridled cheers from the audience after the first movement — this in spite of preconcert instructions by Michael Savage, executive director of the Lincoln Theater, not to applaud between sections. The Symphonie Concertante, with its hair-raising washes of sound, its mysterious ascending brass filling up the auditorium from below like the North Atlantic coming into the Titanic, and its tantalizing melodies on unusual modes, is a work inexcusably neglected. This challenging, audience-pleasing modern work, along with Szymanowski's second (not the first) violin concerto, should be taken up by the S.F. Symphony and other orchestras posthaste.

No lack of familiarity was a barrier to the second concerto, neither to the audience nor its virtuoso violinist, Nikolaj Znaider. Born in Denmark of Polish/Israeli parents, Znaider at 31 emits supreme confidence as he dashes off cadenzas with as much seeming effort as ringing a doorbell. But he doesn't do this soullessly; his musical instincts are sound and his performance moving. If he doesn't yet plumb the complete depths of the Sibelius (perhaps I'm still spoiled by the incredible rendition of this piece by Kyoko Takezawa in Walnut Creek four years ago), his technique astonishes, and I'm sure his growing maturity will bring him even greater future acclaim. Again, Denève's mastery of the dynamics was in evidence: While the third movement was sustained with aggressive vigor, the stops were pulled out all the way for only one climax, making it all the more effective.

The Daphnis No. 2 was lush icing on the cake, brilliantly conceived by Denève and performed to perfection by the Russian band. Maxim Rubtsov, principal flutist, was particularly outstanding in the concluding Danse général, in sections owing a debt to Rimsky-Korsakov's orchestrations where the flute seems to substitute for the frantic filigree of Scheherazade's violin. For this, he and the mop-haired man who knows his volumes received a richly deserved standing ovation.