San Francisco Classical Voice

On the San Francisco Symphony program last Wednesday, between two orchestral blockbusters, a 19 year-old violinist prevailed remarkably. With Yan Pascal Tortelier as guest conductor, Hilary Hahn performed Mozart's fourth concerto, K. 218. in her first appearance with the San Francisco Symphony. Just last spring, she had given an extraordinary performance in the Brahms concerto with the Santa Rosa Symphony.

Mozart is not Hahn's strongest suit, at least not yet. She is very earnest; she hasn't yet learned how to be frivolous enough for this music. She is a little too busy playing magnificently to have Mozart's kind of fun. The inflections Mozart's phrases allow are not all hers, yet--she missed opportunities to scamper, to cajole, to whisper. And occasionally one got the sense that she didn't understand the historical resonance of a turn of phrase. The little introductory passage beginning the finale of the concerto (which comes back several times) has a motive that's obviously a fragment of recitative, a vocal question, but for Hahn it was just another bit of exquisite cantilena.

All of which carping, of course, is grossly unfair, given the quality of the playing. Hahn's Mozart was about as instrumentally perfect as a performance could be. Her sound is rich, deep, and astonishingly powerful. Her bowing is an absolute marvel; it's nearly impossible to tell by ear where she is in the bow or where the bow-changes are. Everything about the performance suggested incredible control and active intelligence. And if "control" suggests restraint or timidity, then it's the wrong word. The impression was rather of enormous force, expertly channeled. She plays with frightening efficiency; no motion, no effort is wasted.

As an encore, Hahn played the last movement of Bach's A-minor solo sonata, with an imaginative variety of articulation and accent missing from her Mozart. Hahn's tour de force overshadowed the rest of the program, but it was fine in its own right.

The opener was Dutilleux' Timbres, éspace, mouvement (1991), in its San Francisco premiere. The piece is dominated, timbrally, by winds, but visually the most striking element is the semicircle of twelve cellos that surrounds the conductor (there are no violins or violas). They lie low, for the most part, in the first movement, but emerge en masse in the second movement (the last of the three sections to be written).

Dutilleux' music is difficult to get a handle on--harmonically and timbrally rich, but sometimes tough to follow. Timbres, éspace, mouvement provides mental handholds in its insistence on certain pitches--G-sharp dominates the first movement, for example--but apart from these, the impression is of a dense and sometimes bewildering narrative, twisting unexpectedly with this or that instrument's intervention. The performance was a fine one, well-controlled and transparent; everything going on in Dutilleux' complicated textures was clear to the ear.

As for Saint-Sa”ns' Symphony No. 3 in C minor, "Organ," which closed the program, the orchestra wisely treated it as an opportunity to make a glorious noise. There were some untidy moments in the strings, especially towards the beginnings of the first movement and the scherzo. But what stuck in the memory were the sonorities of an orchestra at full cry-- the brave sound of the violins high up on the G string, the massed strings in unison, the brilliant brass choir. John Fenstermaker, choir director of Grace Cathedral, was the adept organist; in the last movement's coda he and the orchestra combined to produce a stunning volume of sound.

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

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved