San Francisco Classical Voice

The chamber concerts of the San Francisco Symphony are quite unlike ordinary recitals by chamber ensembles, even big ones. In even the most flexible large ensemble (like, say, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center), there is a core of "regular" players who typically provide the nucleus for any given program, with others added as the music demands. But a Symphony Chamber Players concert often involves almost as many players as there are combined parts in all the pieces on the program. In Sunday's Davies Hall recital (not at all atypical of the series), only one musician--bassist Stephen Tramontozzi--appeared in more than one work.

Such a large cast and so little overlap leaves the program planner with a choice: do you try to provide some sort of unifying theme, or trust to the Symphony's aegis (and the quality of the playing) to supply all the coherence required? Sunday's interesting program drew on both approaches, to its benefit and ours. The first half was about as tightly organized as it could have been: three pieces for relatively unusual ensembles (two of them downright outré), all written within five years of one another in the mid-1920s, and all redolent of that time's spirit of determined, even reckless, experimentation.

And then on the other side of the intermission was Tchaikovsky's string sextet, Souvenir de Florence, in which five more Symphony players were joined by the Siberian violinist Vadim Repin, fresh from a series of performances of John Adams' Violin Concerto with the Symphony. Some of the patrons might momentarily have wondered what the two halves had to do with one another, but it hardly mattered when both were--in their different ways--so enticing.

Prokofiev's Quintet for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola, and bass, Op. 39 (1924), which opened the program, is a peculiar little piece. The flippant, ironic Prokofiev and the ingenuously lyrical Prokofiev are both familiar to most audiences. But neither of them seems to have written this recalcitrant, prickly, and omnivorously cosmopolitan Quintet. The piece was composed originally as a ballet, titled Trapeze, and some of its unusual features, especially its vividness and violence of gesture, were doubtless meant to inspire visual equivalents in the choreography. The six short movements call up an amazing jumble of associations--a little Histoire du soldat, a little Bartók, a little early Kurt Weill, a really surprising amount of Milhaud (the fourth movement, headed "Adagio pesante," has exactly the dense, living, somehow moist chromaticism of an early Milhaud slow movement).

The performance was tight and brilliantly played, though once or twice there seemed to be a slight disagreement going on inside it about whether to emphasize line or articulation. In the "line" camp were the winds, oboist Evgeny Izotov and clarinetist David Neuman, as well as the Symphony's principal violist, Geraldine Walther; on the other side were Tramontozzi (here, as in the Schulhoff Concertino to follow, a constant fount of rhythmic impetus) and violinist Melissa Kleinbart. In the first movement, and on occasion elsewhere, it was the "lines" that won, not necessarily to the good of the music. Kleinbart played incisively, with a perfect barrage of flung bow-strokes, but her basic sound is rather small, and she was often overbalanced by the rich mid-register playing of the clarinet and viola.

Erwin Schulhoff's 1925 Concertino, for flute/piccolo, viola, and bass, featured flutist Catherine Payne, violist Yun Jie Liu, and Tramontozzi. As with the Prokofiev, individual moments in the music suggest all sorts of parallels and precedents, but here there is a sense that they really were all at home together in the same piece. And sometimes there is an uncanny "reminiscence" that, chronologically, can't be anything of the kind. The serene duet of flute and viola/bass ostinato that opens the first movement, for example, is eerily like the first of Ravel's Chansons madécasses, completed a year later. The third movement has a different sort of calm; nothing happens but several restatements of a single enigmatic and chromatic theme, migrating from instrument to instrument and surrounded by the accompanying players with a constantly-shifting cloak of equable counterpoint.

The second and fourth movements (both with piccolo rather than flute, though the last reverts to flute for an eloquent central solo) are exuberant and full of rhythmic energy. The finale, especially, is a pure romp, a fast Central European dance-tune stylized just enough to belong in a concert hall, but not nearly enough to drain the fun out of it. The bizarre instrumentation suddenly makes a different kind of sense--it's like a very small folk band, but translated for "classical" use.

The performance was terrific. Payne is a cool, elegant flutist and a superbly shrill and insistent piccolist. Liu, whom I have not had the pleasure of hearing by himself before, is a marvelous violist, with a rich and unusually even tone and a deft way with articulation. The ensemble's setup had his instrument's F-holes facing away from the audience, but even so, he more than held his own in the balance.

Between the two larger pieces came Bohuslav Martinu's 1927 Duo for violin and cello, played by violinist Naomi Kazama and cellist David Goldblatt. Martinu the string-duo composer had a genuine voice of his own; it's not only that this Duo sounds like no other composer's, but that Martinu's better-known Three madrigals for violin and viola, written twenty years later, plays the same striking textural games. Chief among them is what's called "hocket"--the two players alternating notes, together creating a sort of composite line. It's a difficult thing to do well, because it's much easier to lay down a coherent line than it is to merge two interlocking lines into one.

Kazama and Goldblatt nailed every hocket that Martinu threw at them, and they did a rather nice job with the pensive, vaguely bitonal first movement. The second-movement rondo--a sort of puppy-dog of a piece, following its own bounding nose into all sorts of random places--was beyond them in more ways than one. That they couldn't make it seem coherent was not really their fault; nothing but sheer superhuman sleight-of-hand could have done that. But they didn't quite manage to make it fun, either, and that was a simple failure of panache. The piece is meant for a pair of glitzy string soloists--players with excess technique to burn, rhetorical instincts honed on concertos and virtuoso encores, and no particular qualms about sounding tacky. Kazama and Goldblatt gave it an honorable performance, but they were not the personalities to make it work.

As for the Tchaikovsky, it is fortunately the kind of piece that a great first violinist can carry almost by himself. Repin's playing was simply magnificent. His command in the overtly brilliant passages was thrilling, with an instinctive virtuoso's swagger and seemingly endless reserves of tone (in the finale's frenetic last seconds, he somehow summoned up more sound). But his quiet playing was something else. The second movement's melody (one of Tchaikovsky's most luscious tunes) began as a slender, silvery thread of sound, growing imperceptibly over the course of the long duet with the first cello, and inflected along the whole span with innumerable delicate shadings of color and vibrato. It was playing as elegant as I've heard in a long time.

The Symphony players, unfortunately, fell far short of his standard. The problem was not, as one might expect, lack of rehearsal time (apart from one sad derailment at the end of the scherzo, ensemble was actually pretty impressive), but something more basic. Souvenir de Florence demands a first cello (and, less urgently, a first viola) capable of duetting as equals with the first violin. Jill Rachuy Brindel, the first cellist, seemed to be pushing herself to match Repin's richness of tone. The result was coarse, overwrought, and none-too-accurate playing that proved a serious liability throughout, especially in the slow movement's ecstatic duets.

Don Ehrlich, first viola, played with greater discipline, but apart from the opening of the third movement (where he had a chance to get down on the C string), his tone in the many solos was curiously dull and wooden. Nancy Ellis, the other violist, had a much more ingratiating sound, but also, alas, much less to do. Violinist Zoya Leybin (who held her own with Repin in the many passages in octaves) and cellist Barbara Bogatin rounded out an ensemble that made a fine sound in tuttis, but repeatedly disappointed when the players had to take on solo roles.

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

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved