San Francisco Classical Voice

Chang played both movements with broad legato and with a penetrating, rich sound that others will likely have admired more than I did; that fast, wide, persistently over-the-note vibrato Chang uses when she wants to be intense is not to my taste. But when she wanted to she could pare her tone down to almost nothing, while still remaining audible everywhere in the hall: a violinist's stage whisper. She didn't do this often, to her credit (it's the sort of trick that can become intensely irritating after a few repetitions). And when she got a chance to use all her resources with no accompaniment, in the vast cadenza after the third movement, she paced herself very well, going from that attenuated sound to the full-out one by natural degrees, and building up the tension and the speed towards the end so that the onset of the festive finale after all that brooding made a kind of goofy sense.

The orchestra, for its part, was alert and virtuosic as ever, but not always quite on top of the beat in the fast movements (Chang's headlong performance didn't make it easy). And there were places where I thought the orchestra was showing what I can only call undue deference to the soloist. The place in the Passacaglia where the cellos pick up the violinist's last line, while she spins a new one, for example: that ought to be a real duet, a tussle of equally powerful lines. As it was, the cellos only gave the impression that they were afraid of drowning Chang out. I doubt they could've done it if they tried, but trying might have been a decent start.

The concert opened with the first Symphony performance of Bruno Maderna's 1972 Aura. It was fascinating if somewhat bewildering music, changing direction unexpectedly and refusing the listener any firm trajectory. But the textures were gorgeous. The strings are multiply divided and seated antiphonally, some of each section on either side of the stage; at the opening of the piece they're by themselves, producing a marvelous, billowing fabric of sound, woven of threads that change bar by bar. Later there are other things: brief interpolations by the brass, melancholy woodwind solos, a weird and wonderful mix of woodblocks and mallet percussion.

Abbado conducted clearly and elegantly; anyone who's ever played a piece with stochastic elements in it would have appreciated the clarity of his cueing in the last few minutes of the Maderna. After intermission we were to find out how he dealt with more familiar music: the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition. Conclusion: Abbado likes his brisk music brilliant, his slow music broad, and his colors bright. That, of course, did very well for most of Pictures. The lively pieces — the Unhatched Chicks, Limoges, even Tuileries — were played with that magnificent swagger of virtuosity the Symphony (not without reason) takes on when given an opportunity to show off. "Bydlo" was ponderous and sonorous, the outer parts of "Samuel Goldenburg" demonstrated what power the Symphony strings have in unison, and "Il vecchio castello," with David Henderson's uncannily beautiful sax playing as linchpin, was exquisite. And the ending diptych of "Baba-Yaga" and the "Great Gate of Kiev" was the sonic spectacular Ravel obviously meant it to be. The weak parts, oddly, were the Promenades, too slow and too grandiloquent for their purpose in the piece.