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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Kennedy And A Symphonic Show
October 23, 1999
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By Marvin Tartak
Excitement ruled during the San Francisco Symphony's performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto last Saturday. A string on the soloist's violin broke. Disaster? Cool heads saved the situation, but the audience experienced an unexpected drama, adding to the tension of the program.
On this last night of a four-evening series, the violinist (Nigel) Kennedy gave a magnificent account of the splendid concerto. Though the guest conductor, Andres Delfs, began the first movement in a fairly unemotional fashion, sturdy but uncommitted, the music came to life with the soloist's
charismatic entrance. Can there be a more personal and attractive violinist on the stage today? Mannerisms notwithstanding, Kennedy presents himself as a towering personality in his musicianship. His attitude toward the score, his listening to others as he plays (often turning his back on the audience to face the strings or the woodwinds), his entire body thrust into the rhythms with a stamping foot and a flexible bending knee, his sheer vitality make him a performer the audience loves.
Somewhere during the first movement's development section, the string snapped. The conductor seemed to falter as Kennedy turned to the concertmaster of the evening, Mark Volkert. The music turned pale for a brief second. Violins were exchanged, and the music continued without
serious loss of energy. A rapt audience concentrated on the mini-drama taking place. In no time at all the repair was done with admirable sang-froid, violins returned to their respective owners. Through it all, music was paramount. Ultimately the accident seemed an unfortunate and unimportant distraction.
Kennedy made the concerto's performance a success without the full emotional assistance of the conductor. A blander orchestral rendering of this work can hardly be imagined. The pacing was ordinary, the effect uninvolved in the first movement, the conductor playing it safe. The Adagio second movement, on the other hand, was rather brisk. It has often been said that in his later works, Brahms composed slow movements that are not very slow, fast movements not particularly fast. Every tempo meets somewhere in the middle, evenly paced but not violently exciting. This conductor was careful, did nothing to offend, but certainly nothing to engage the audience, either. For vivacity everything was owed to Kennedy. Once he entered, he shaped the piece with mastery. At times he forced the tempo changes in strange ways; for instance, the passages marked poco ritardando became deliberately and unusually slow. Only in the last movement, when he begins alone, does he get to choose the speed of the "Allegro." There, he rushed, and the orchestra followed pell-mell. It was breathtaking but pushed. Kennedy played a first movement cadenza other than the one created by the concerto's first performer, Brahms' friend Joachim. Kennedy's was much longer and more brilliant. Could it be his own? Could it be Fritz Kreisler's? Why not give the information somewhere in the program? Recordings do so as a matter of course. To conclude the first half of the concert, Kennedy played a delightful encore, improvising on a blues theme by the recently-deceased Milt Jackson, of the Modern Jazz Quartet. He was joined by the principal double bass player, Michael Burr; what a delightful pair! Kennedy was enjoying himself. The audience was ecstatic.
Two mammoth orchestral works for the second half of the program, brought out the full panoply of percussion, strings, and the kitchen sink. Audiences love this sort of display, for visiting conductors, it's meat and drink, for the musicians' union, sheer delight. First came a showy extravaganza by John Corigliano, the suite Three Hallucinations (Sacrifice--Hymn--Ritual) in its San Francisco premiere. Portions of this were originally written in 1980 as the film score for Ken Russell's "Altered States." This is modern music for people who hate modern music. Certainly it is more accomplished than the bulk of music written for the films, and it must have been splendid as background to a science fiction movie. As orchestral fodder, however, it's second-rate, a series of orchestral devices with associative effects designed for a sound track. The start was ominous, uggy-buggy stuff. Menacing glissandos here and there, repeated-note motives in various instruments, banal patterns that became noisy with much banging from the percussion group. It was rhetoric of deafening intensity, marvelous to watch and almost a total bore. I did like the gloss on Rock of Ages, an out-of-tune piano battering fragments offstage in the south wing, foreground solo strings in polytonal counterpoint wheezing the hymn. For the rest, Corigliano opened the master resource book of modernistic technique and shamelessly borrowed from everybody else in the 20th century. It's enough to give eclecticism a bad name. The concluding piece was Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier Suite. The orchestra played exceptionally well, throwing itself into a wallow of sentiment. Delfs was in his glory, although he liked this music faster than other conductors do it. The phrases were artfully shaped, those Viennese hesitations before the downbeat growing bigger and bigger. By the end, it was rather grotesque, a series of rubatos becoming more and more mannered. Were the members of the orchestra having fun? One is not supposed to ask this question. With a conductor like Michael Tilson Thomas, it always seems to be so. With Delfs I'm not so sure. They often seemed to be being dragged about by the conductor, victim to his whims. The form of this arrangement is artless, a potpourri of the opera's themes, arranged in an arbitrary sequence. You could hear the seams from section to section, the composer's logic abandoned as one tune aimlessly followed another. Whoever did this pastiche, it was a cut-and-paste job. The music is still delicious, but the suite is unsuccessful as a musical experience, leaving the unpleasant taste of opportunistic thievery. It rides on the back of a much more imposing masterpiece, and the listener hungers for the real thing. (Marvin Tartak, a pianist noted for contemporary music, teaches a course in Opera at City College of San Francisco. He has written program notes for the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, also has edited two volumes of Rossini for the Fondazione Rossini, and is soon to embark on a third.) ©1999 Marvin Tartak, all rights reserved |