San Francisco Classical Voice

The result doesn't exactly sound like Bartók; the scoring is cruder, the joins awkward, the harmony improbably mild even by the standard of the Concerto for Orchestra. Then, too, the piece is tailored to Primrose's gifts (Serly was Primrose's colleague in the NBC Symphony and knew his playing well) to a degree that tends to make it next to impossible for anyone else — not impossible to play, of course, but impossible to play without visible struggle and audible strain.

Walther took it on so easily that her performance would have been in danger of glibness had it not also obviously been thought out with such care. Primrose himself had nothing over her (judging, at least, by the two Primrose broadcast recordings of the concerto that I've heard). Her suavity and his grittiness are maybe the only two ways of making the piece work; but there are very few people alive who can do either. And Walther takes her path superbly. How any violist can play so freely and securely high up the A string, and also make such a magnificent sound on the C, and also make the same splendid sound in the middle range, I don't know, but may she long keep doing it. (And may the Symphony realize eventually that they have a genuine national treasure on their hands, and start compiling some of her performances for release.)

Oramo's accompaniment was deft and attentive, of a piece with his conducting throughout the program. Before the Bartók came the San Francisco Symphony premiere of Kaija Saariaho's Du cristal ("From Crystal"), the first half of an orchestral diptych written in the late 1980s. It made for fascinating but frustrating listening. Saariaho's dense, slowly-shifting, multi-layered textures, spangled with tuned percussion (and extremely discreet electronics) and punctuated at intervals by fierce eruptions of timpani, compel the listener's attention. But it was hard to discern a trajectory over the almost-twenty-minute span — hard, indeed, to know why the piece was exactly the length it was, rather than ten minutes shorter or, for that matter, ten minutes longer. It was a journey without fixed starting or ending points. Saariaho comments that Du cristal "provides a sonic representation of certain physical aspects of a geological crystal — solidity of construction, structural repetition, a sense of stasis and density [ . . . ]." But the piece certainly doesn't aim at crystalline clarity of form. Every bar is striking (Saariaho has an ear for unusual and beautiful sonorities), but the totality is elusive. In mineral terms, think fractured tourmaline rather than diamond.

And after intermission, a feast of late Sibelius: the Sixth Symphony and then the late tone-poem Tapiola. Oramo's Sixth was austere — not quite so sternly so as the recording by his compatriot Osmo Vänska, but not a performance designed to emphasize the sensuous appeal of the score. The opening, for example, was very beautifully but very remotely played, delicate and distant in music that, in other hands, has sometimes been positively voluptuous. In fact, Oramo's restraint made for a powerful performance, one that emphasized the sheer strangeness of the piece (which a more indulgent performance might have obscured). He relented only in the finale, where the recapitulation was phrased with a tenderness (and an unusually slow tempo) that presaged the eager drive to the end; and where the concluding chorale music was broad, powerful, exalted. The final "D" of the violins is supposed to be held after the other strings cut off, but I have never heard it continued as long as Oramo dared. The orchestra seemed to hold its breath; I know the audience did.

The performance of the harrowing Tapiola was as fine — taut, atmospheric, fierce as hell where the music erupts. There was no encore; nor could there have been.