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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Final Mozart Program Disappoints
July 29, 2001
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By Bruce Lamott
To cap off the San Francisco Symphony's Mozart Festival, a sold-out Davies Symphony hall audience heard Neville Marriner conduct the Requiem and Piano Concerto No. 27 Friday, rendering the crooked straight and the rough places plain — except, that is, for the places that remained rough. There was great anticipation for this scion of the Schwann (Record Catalog), who last appeared with the orchestra in 1977 and whose recordings of Mozart are legion. It was all the more disappointing, then, to hear such a pedestrian and uninspired reading of such familiar masterworks.
The fault certainly did not lie with Vance George's Symphony Chorus, which needed at times to rely on spontaneous combustion to ignite the spirit of the Requiem, for the conducting seemed to communicate little beyond the necessary. The chorus' "Rex tremendae" was grand and powerful, and the "Lacrymosa" provided the most heartfelt and sensitively shaped lines of the evening. (The magic seemed to last past the cutoff, however, as chorus and orchestra lurched awkwardly into the following movement.) Elsewhere, the chorus could only provide what was asked for, though the stunning blend of women's sections as they floated the "Voca me" was transcendent.
In contrast, the unfortunate solo quartet was decidedly earthbound. An 18th century listener might have been bemused by the unintentional representation of the Four Temperaments in the "Recordare:" a sanguine soprano, melancholy alto, phlegmatic tenor, and choleric bass, each creating his or her own subtext without regard for either the text or the sense of ensemble. Soprano Heidi Grant Murphy sang consistently sharp throughout the evening, overselling the liturgical text with effortful mannerisms.
The clarity and elegance of the trombone solo in the "Tuba mirum" was telling in juxtaposition with bass Michael George's wooly tone and diffuse intonation. Elsewhere, George delivered each line as if it were written for the Commandatore. Tenor Stanford Olsen fared the best of the lot, though he approached his upper register with undue caution. Marriner's tempi seemed bereft of internal life. The "Dies irae" was tedious rather than infernal. The momentum of the poetic text was halted by a foursquare rendering of every beat in the bar. The nuances of accent, whether dictated by the text or by the musical meter itself — known to Mozart's contemporaries as intrinsically "good" (accented) or "bad" (unaccented) beats, or quantitas intrinseca — were ironed out into rhythmically flat planes. Even the "Kyrie" fugue was squared off into choppy fragments, losing the linear interplay of Mozart's phrases. Dynamics, too, lacked contour and nuance. This was presaged in the Piano Concerto in B-flat, K. 595, which opened the program. Marriner and soloist Lars Vogt gave an aerial view of the work, noticing neither forest nor trees. Each gave his own version of the first movement, with Vogt pressing ahead rather than finding the god in the details.
Ensemble seemed coincidental, rather than conversational, except when the woodwinds came to the fore with a charming divertimento passage. Vogt, making his debut with the Symphony, seemed to be looking beyond the work to more virtuosic heights, at the same time running amok in the passagework. The allegro finale would scarcely have qualified as an allegretto in some books, with Marriner enervating rather than invigorating the rondo. The Symphony dedicated this program to the memory of four Symphony musicians who passed away this year: Marc Lifschey, Verne Sellin, Edward Haug, and David Sheinfeld. (Bruce Lamott is choral director of the Philharmonia Chorale and the Carmel Bach Festival. He is also an instructor in music and Western civilization at San Francisco University and conducts choral classes in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Extension Program.) ©2001 Bruce Lamott, all rights reserved |
