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FEATURE: LETTER FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.
April 22, 2006
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In Fine Form By Robert P. Commanday
Washington, D.C. — Hearing the San Francisco Symphony on tour has
always been a great upper. The repeated playing of two or three programs and
the challenge of different halls and audiences combine to draw out the
musicians' best. Saturday I happened to be in the nation's capital and
caught the orchestra's performance in the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall at
the unconventional time of 4:30 p.m. (The hall was unavailable in the
evening, booked for a regular National Symphony performance, but no matter — the San Francisco Symphony still drew a full house, and at premium prices.)
In a word, the performance was first-rate. The orchestra was at home in this hall. It seemed to benefit from being placed flat on the stage, without risers. (I have always felt that the riser seating of the orchestra
at Davies Hall creates more balance problems than it solves.) It sounded as
if they could hear themselves better and were playing to each other more
sensitively. This was crucial in their bringing off Debussy's ballet score
Jeux, the most advanced and elusive of his works. Looking boldly
toward the future, the piece demands the utmost refinement in performance to
bring out the delicate play of color on which the associations that link the
changing musical ideas depend. That is what Michael Tilson Thomas and his
orchestra achieved.
The most endearing of Ravel's works, the Piano Concerto in G, had a smart and snappy performance, Jean-Yves Thibaudet at the keyboard. Brilliant as he was when heard playing it with the Boston Symphony last October, on Saturday he ratcheted tempos and attacks up a few notches. The madcap scurrying passagework, at Mach 2 pace, was like dust mites in a high wind. He and Tilson Thomas leaned into the blue-note jazz melodies and cut the syncopations tightly. The choicest matter was, as always in this piece, the Adagio, with its wistful lyric soliloquy for the piano and the bittersweet bite of the flute and the clarinet entries, like an unbidden memory. The Adagio from Mahler's unfinished Symphony No. 10, in F sharp, had a deep, thoughtful reading. This movement will be the latest to be recorded in the Symphony's complete Mahler cycle, and it's ready. The Adagio of the 10th stands alone as a kind of compendium of Mahler's inspiration. No other work he wrote is so comprehensive and satisfying in its reach, freedom, arc, breadth of line, emotional grasp, and engrossing melody. The viola section in particular has never sounded richer and more unified; the full brass more throaty and deep; and the horns, led by Robert Ward, more eloquent. Finally came Siegfried's "Rhine Journey" from Wagner's Götterdămmerung, handsomely rendered, poised, and evocative of the whole Ring experience. As he did with the other works, Tilson Thomas conducted with a quiet reserve and restraint — no outgoing gestures, nothing more than this focused orchestra needed. A welcome change in style, and evidence of growth. In response to the audience's demonstration of appreciation, Tilson Thomas led an unexpected encore, for strings alone: Edvard Grieg's delicate The Last Spring. The strings in the high register were drawn down to a fine thread of tone, like a distant thought. It was a spell. It summarized an approach to this concert, a quality clearly intended to draw the audience to the music, making them all active listeners, their rapt attention sustained in the silence of the hall for many seconds after the last note faded away. That was the test.
(Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle from 1965 to 1993, and before that a conductor and a lecturer at UC Berkeley.)
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