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SYMPHONY REVIEW
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By John Lutterman
Listening to the San Francisco Symphony last Friday as a critic was a new experience. Always a critical listener and willing opinion-sharer, this time I found myself acutely aware of the importance of considering and voicing my thoughts fairly and responsibly, an awareness that certainly colored my experience of the concert without hampering enjoyment. The interesting program shone the spotlight on many gifted soloists, and the polished, highly professional quality of the performances gave me a renewed sense of pride in the symphony and its conductor.
Alicia Weilerstein, the cello soloist in the Saint-Sa”ns Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, showed evidence of a strong, mature musical personality. The Saint-Sa”ns is one of the first major concertos that young cellists typically study, but well-established soloists often struggle with the challenges it presents. Weilerstein faced these head on, and projected a sense of sovereign control that seemed to carry the audience with her.
Exception might be taken to certain of her decisions and to minor technical flaws, but this was a captivating performance. I would have liked to hear a broader range of articulation and tone colors, especially vibrato, but she made convincing use of her chosen palette. And although the opening seemed a bit stiff, Weilerstein's sense of rubato was quite effective.
The real disappointment was the playing of the orchestra-polished, but unimaginative and rather heavy-footed. One of the concerto's strengths (as the program notes pointed out) is the care Saint-Sa”ns took with the orchestration to make sure that the cello would project over the accompaniment. Even so, Weilerstein was overbalanced. A fuller, more focused sound would perhaps have helped, but in the end Weilerstein's was heartfelt, dramatic playing, full of wit and poetry, lacking only a more imaginative, sympathetic response from her partners.
The rest of the program seemed lacking in much the same way. Copland's Quiet City and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra were given well-polished, thoughtful treatment. The danger of highly professional performances is that the polishing can smooth out the sharp edges that are so important to works like these. In the Copland, Glenn Fischthal's dignified trumpet solo and Julie Ann Giacobassi's poised English horn, playing were set against beautifully lush string playing, creating a peaceful, atmospheric mood, but there was little sense of the poignant, nervous struggle suggested by Copland's program. Composed when Bartók was struggling with depression, leukemia, and the difficulties of life as an expatriate, Concerto for Orchestra is a work of immense emotional range, much of it quite dark. It is, of course, an orchestral tour de force. The members of the San Francisco Symphony left no doubt of their ability to master the technical challenges which it presents, but much of it seemed too easy. The wind players were marvelously witty in the famous duets of the "Game of Pairs," especially the couplings for bassoons and for trombones. The strings played with finesse and commitment, but it was only in the more obviously difficult passages, those in which the sense of struggle was evident, that the sense of risk and the edge that the music seems to demand could be heard. The otherwise powerful performance of the triumphal finale was greatly weakened by the lack of contrast in the piece as a whole. In the end, while symphony and conductor were certainly more than up to task, it seemed clear that it was Weilerstein who, by opening her own heart, found her way into the hearts of the audience.
(John Lutterman is a cellist and musicologist. He holds a DMA from SUNY Stony Brook and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in historical musicology at UC Davis.) ©2001 John Lutterman, all rights reserved |
