San Francisco Classical Voice

Last week's San Francisco Symphony concert, cleverly juxtaposing vastly contrasting works, proved most informative and enriching, traversing the same journey many will recall experiencing with Marcel Marceau's Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death.

Felix Mendelssohn's Two-Piano Concerto, written when he was 16, is full of youthful vitality and uncomplicated optimism. As performed by the Labeque sisters with appropriate charm, flair and flourish, it is easy to imagine Felix sitting across from Fanny, an able composer in her own right, tossing musical challenges back and forth, with equally amused expressions on their faces. No one enjoys the music as much as the two pianists themselves.

In contrast, Josef Suk's "Asrael" Symphony, named after the Islamic angel of Death, is a Requiem, both for his mentor and father-in-law, Antonin Dvorak, as well as for Suk's beloved wife, Dvorak's daughter, who died just 15 months after her father. Only 31 himself, Suk imbued his memorial with the full range of emotions that engulfed him, from inconsolable grief to reconciliation, composing as much to save himself from submitting to ultimate despair as to provide a monument to his beloved family. It is the cry of maturity experiencing the cruel fate of death, so far removed from the immortal thinking of youth.

Whereas Marceau literally walks through the stages of life within a few minutes, a monument to sparsity of movement speaking volumes, Suk is unsparing in his extended statement.

Monumental the Symphony is, in extended orchestral size, in length--one hour, in over-bearing volume. Guest conductor Libor Pesek ably scaled the range of emotional twists and turns. Pesek faltered only in the third, sinister-like movement, not providing enough bite and cynicism to match musical intent. Otherwise, his broad interpretation revealed the widest universal statement of mourning that the music itself permits.

The question remains, does Suk's symphony attain universality of meaning? And if not, should it nevertheless appear in symphonic repertoire? Should the youthful Mendelssohn's concerto appear, despite its own falling short of major status? Are we, the listening audience enriched by major minor works?

This reviewer's answers are: not quite, yes, yes, yes. The Suk does not attain the status of a great work. Its over-bearing quality is not emotion recollected in tranquility, crafted artistically. It is raw, caught in the throes of experience, literally ear-piercing at times, despite its quiet ending. More than that, it is not distinctive. Thus, it has neither the voice of individual genius, nor the universality that genius implies.

However, experiencing its own passion, putting it alongside compositions of Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler, whose names are linked with Suk's, helps us in our overall understanding of musical tradition in the same way that knowing how individual, if not equally important, U.S. presidents add up to American history. Hearing it, hearing the Mendelssohn in unfettered play, enriches in complementary ways our appreciation of the giants the same way that entrées are enriched and fulfilled by a dinner's other accoutrements.

A final word. About pianos. Is anyone else alarmed at hearing the increasing sharpness in tone of today's pianos, in concert and on CD's? Even the formerly lush Steinway sound has given way to tinniness when played above a mezzoforte on the concert stage. Is the increase in brashness of sound caused by the way pianos played in enormous concert arenas are voiced, or to the way pianists directly thrust arm weight into the keyboard in order to be heard? One suspects it is both.

Even with the warm sonority of the Davies Hall acoustics, in dynamic passages the two pianos screeched. The same unpleasant brashness is heard not only in the Labeques' CD "Encore!" but in an increasing number of CD's featuring classical piano playing. This leads us to suspect that the art of engineering is a culprit as well. The incompatibility of loud piano playing with beautiful tone is not inevitable, as can be testified by those who remember the "dinosaur" days of Rubinstein, Kempf, Backhaus, Michelangeli. For the sake of beauty, sanity and hearing, may it some day return.

(Margret Elson has dual careers as pianist, and as artistic counselor to artists and performers. She has been teaching and performing in the Bay Area for almost 30 years and is the recent recipient, with Elizabeth Swarthout, of an NEA grant for the CD "Twentieth Century American 4-Hand Piano Music." She has masters degrees in Psychology, Journalism and Political Science.)

©1998 Margret Elson, all rights reserved