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SYMPHONY REVIEW A Man for All Music November 15, 2001
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By Heuwell Tircuit
Things don't change much. There aren't a lot of great musicians around, and there never were. But there are some, although they are not always at the forefront of this moment's publicity buzz. Conductor Roberto Abbado, who led last week's San Francisco Symphony concerts, clearly belongs to the top level, right up there with his more famous uncle, Claudio, now winding down his stewardship of the Berlin Philharmonic.
I attended the Thursday matinee by choice, just to see what Roberto Abbado could accomplish. Matinee concerts, where performance standards tend to sag a bit, are always a kind of acid test. Only the seriously talented cope well with that innate lathery sense. As it turned out, the concert was terrific, with the orchestra playing as well as I've ever heard it.
Abbado offered a mixed, balanced program with nary a warhorse in sight. The late Alfred Schnittke's
Impeccably tasteful and technically adroit, Abbado showed a musicality that left the audience delighted and, I gather, the orchestra as well. Excellent balances and a keen sensibility of dynamics were everywhere apparent. Best of all, Abbado is intelligent enough to play each work within its own appropriate style. He sounded uncommonly perceptive throughout and in the Beethoven, subtly inventive. He's good at solving problems. Beethoven's 1798 Second Piano Concerto holds many charms and one major problem. First in order of composition, the Second was originally published without a formal cadenza, leaving that for improvisation. Ten years later, after completing the "Appassionata" Sonata, Beethoven added a long, complex cadenza in his mature virtuoso style, with not so much as a genuflection toward his early classicism. That contrast often proves a disruptive jolt for the attentive listener. Abbado found a way around the problem. He injected a muscular sense of urgency into the orchestral support. Articulation was more emphatic than usual for early Beethoven, the general weight of tone fatter and louder. Instead of the usual Mozartian elegance, Abbado got the kind of full sonority one expects for performances of the "Eroica" or Fifth symphony. Great idea! Problem solved.
In this, Abbado was abetted by pianist Cascioli, who played the body of the work with full strength. When the notorious cadenza came along he played it as a quite free improvisation, thus softening the effect a bit. The lyrical passages almost sounded like Chopin, mauve rubato brimming from the phrasing and extreme contrasts in dynamic levels used for expressive gestures. Much to my surprise, it all worked beautifully. Cascioli plays in the best traditions of the great Italian piano school. Pure, clean textures and major concern for precise attention to timbre were top class. Born in 1979, Cascioli needs only a bit of maturity in his playing to reach the highest levels of the piano world. He seemed a tad impulsive, for example, often letting the passage filigree dash ahead of the orchestra — not consistently, but enough to be a bother. Age and a bit more experience ought to solve that problem, as it usually does. Schnittke's kinky title can mean several things, or nothing, depending on how you care to view it. It's a vague reference to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, partly accounted for by the fact that the piece was commissioned by and premiered at the 1985 Salzburg Festival. That year's Festival highlighted Shakespeare, his plays an inspiration for assorted composers. With this misspelled German, the title might be either a literal admission, or a denial of any Shakespearean influence.
All that apart, (K)ein Sommernachtstraum is essentially a miniature theme and variations. As a special gesture to Salzburg, the minute theme comes across as a parody of Mozartian style. (A very good parody, one should add.) The individual variations in this 10-minutes-plus work move all over the chart, suggesting everything from Ives to Ligeti at one time or another. Most of the composition is tonal, but with many segments delving into a free-fall of dissonant texture . Over his lifetime (1934-98) Schnittke largely earned his daily bowl of borscht as a film composer. That requires a special talent of descriptive underlining for a variety of moods, shifting scene by scene. Form becomes irrelevant. Alas, this anything-goes idea pockmarks Schnittke's concert music. Things just don't hold to course as his style meanders through gimmicks. Substance falls by the wayside. The opening statement of the theme, for instance, is played as a solo from the back of the second violins, accompanied only by the piano. To what purpose? Shock the bourgeois? (I'm sure that somewhere, some armchair musicologists may claim this an obtuse reference to Siberia, or some such nonsense.) Schnittke's constant, radical shift of styles is a bit like playing ping-pong without a net. One hears a little of this, a little of that, and ultimately not much of anything.
Abbado led the Schnittke with care and devotion but the star item of the afternoon turned out to be Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony. First of all, it's a splendid accomplishment which has always struck me as the composer's finest orchestral work. It has lyrical beauty, lots of vitality and uncommon architectural strength. There is none of that slipping of gears between one tune and the next so common to early Rachmaninoff and the orchestration is consistently refreshing. Best of all, there's no loss of dignity, none of the sappy sentimentality of the more popular Rachmaninoff. Audiences have yet really to discover this symphony, simply because it gets so little exposure. Performances as vital and sympathetic as Abbado offered likely made converts last week. It's a symphony due to reach standard repertory, especially when so splendidly set forward by a superb young advocate like Roberto Abbado. (Heuwell Tircuit, composer, performer and writer, was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the SF Chronicle, previously for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.) ©2001 Heuwell Tircuit, all rights reserved |
