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SYMPHONY REVIEW
October 29, 2004
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By Renato Rodolfo-Sioson
The Good Concert Program eludes easy description. (It's somewhat like defining the Ironic: “I know it when I hear it.”) In fact, good programming is probably defined more quickly through its absence; it is not assured, for example, by a vague historical proximity of the pieces offered. That certainly held true with the program presented by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony on Friday, a bewildering agglomeration of stylistically divergent pieces united under that weakest of rubrics, “Music of the nth Century.” A similar effect would arise at a banquet in which every dish — each one exquisitely prepared — did little to enhance or complement the flavors of the others.
Fortunately, problematic concert programs do not always define the quality of the performance. By probing deeply into the stylistic soundworld of each piece, and taking each on its own terms, the Symphony turned in a series of independently striking, sometimes overwhelming performances.
By far the most familiar work was Rachmaninov's omnipresent Second Piano Concerto, although there was nothing terribly familiar about Leif Ove Andsnes' interpretation. His sober appearance in a four-buttoned black Nehru jacket was the perfect sartorial match for his unadorned, profoundly serious – I'm even tempted to say clerical – musical demeanor. But while Andsnes may have sounded emotionally cool and undramatic at first hearing (the man himself seems incapable of any neurotically-charged fits of barnstorming), that was primarily due to the subtlety of his formidable technical gifts. He is capable of producing Rachmaninov's torrential note-saturated passages without any noticeable strain.
Indeed, Andsnes preferred to avoid the effortful or laborious — none of those long stretches of harmonically-driven chords pounded out fortissimo — in favor of carefully crafted phrasing, lovingly shaped dynamics, artful shifts of tempo and, above all, a highly burnished approach to sound production. If the results had none of the obvious emotional displays that one usually associates with Rachmaninov, nevertheless Andsnes' quietly poetic manner and his expressive honesty I found to be more intensely moving than initially expected.
The piano's presence — if only by implication — opened each half of the concert as well, with two extravagantly diverse orchestral transcriptions. First on the program was Aaron Copland's Orchestral Variations, his 1957 orchestration of the trenchantly craggy Piano Variations composed much earlier (in 1930). Although the “modern” flavor of the original was partly derived from the relatively narrow sonic compass of the piano (I'm reminded of the visual impact of all those grays and blacks in Picasso's Guernica), Copland's granitic orchestration retained much of a similar effect. Rather than exploiting the orchestra merely for its coloristic possibilities, Copland preferred to juxtapose contrasting blocks of sound against each other. The transcription is fiercely virtuosic, requiring extremes of precision from the entire orchestra. I was bowled over by Tilson Thomas' absolute control, especially during those frequent pointillistic stretches of fearsome rhythmic complexity. My sole reservation was with the latitude he allowed the brass choir. One of the more obvious among Copland's sound blocks, their recurrent entrances, blared out fortississimo and beyond, soon became quite mind numbing. Maybe the gesture was meant to recapture something of the shock value that musical modernism once enjoyed. The other orchestration, after Debussy's “En blanc et noir” (In white and black), was a more curious affair. It was done by Robin Holloway, a wonderfully inventive British composer whose credits include reworkings of familiar works, such as his recent Gilded Goldbergs. He completely transformed Debussy's original from its rather severe two-piano texture into a rich, motley orchestral carnival, a complete about-face from the Copland. There are many appealing elements to Holloway's detailed orchestration, captured by the Symphony. The second movement, for example, projected a kind of “movie score” atmosphere perfectly in keeping with its quasi-programmatic depiction of trench warfare. But I question whether such a gaudy transformation can successfully realize the terse, almost gnomic quality that Debussy exhibited in his brief final period. Moreover, his dizzyingly episodic musical structures seem to cohere better with the sparer sonorities and smaller ensembles that he favored at that time.
Preceded by such diametrically opposed works, perhaps the Shostakovich Symphony No. 9 provided a fitting conclusion to the evening, being itself a puzzling progression of five wildly divergent states. Reeling from a jocular opening, through poignant nostalgia, to the final triple-movement complex (giddy hysteria-disconsolate pathos-fatuous jubilation) there is a kind of schizophrenic quality to the whole symphony. Tilson Thomas knows exactly how to portray those schizoid shifts of mood (which is not to cast aspersions on his mental state!). I did think, however, that his view of the piece occasionally leaned towards the overemphatic; here and there, a lighter touch might have served better. Among these would be the series of menacing two-note “scoops” from the strings in the second movement (Moderato), which began too strongly. The witty first theme of the opening Allegro (surely a direct descendant of the finale to Prokofiev's Classical Symphony) needed a crisper, more cleanly articulated attack. But special kudos for the wind band — the marvellous whip-crack ensembles of the Presto third movement; the cheeky piccolo's insouciant solos in the first movement; and, above all, the heart-rending bassoon lament in the Largo fourth movement. Perhaps my objections to Tilson Thomas' program are only so much caviling, but I cannot help but wonder if these works might have had greater impact in other contexts. To take an analogous program drawn from the 19th century: could one truly appreciate, say, a succession that included an orchestration of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Saint-Saëns' Second Piano Concerto, the orchestration of Brahms's G-minor Piano Quartet (with Arnold Schoenberg as our Holloway), and Bizet's C-major Symphony?
(Renato Rodolfo-Sioson has a Master's degree in musicology from the
University of California, Berkeley. He also received the Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music in piano performance while studying in India and occasionally appears as an accompanist and chamber musician throughout the Bay Area.)
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Leif Ove Andsnes