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SYMPHONY REVIEW
November 26, 2004
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By Jerry Kuderna
Youthful vigor and vitality were the watchwords at the San Francisco Symphony this week as the French-born conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier returned with works that hightlighted the connections between Rome and Paris and effected a mini-tour of those cities as heard through the ears of their composers.
Debussy's earliest orchestral work, Printemps (1887), was composed around the time that he won the Prix de Rome, and it was a pleasure to hear it played with the verve and joie de vivre that it received in this performance. Never mind that it began life as a fugue composed on a theme by Massenet — Printemps declares a new Spring of French music. Debussy gets a lot of mileage out of the single motive, which may have been allowed to overstay its welcome. But (over-)familiarity sometimes leads to contemplation and, when he finally gets around to introducing the whole-tone scale F-G-A-B after the climax of the first movement (and in the context of F# major!), it is amazing how fresh it still sounds. As for the orchestration, I thought it was by Debussy until I read the program notes. It was actually built up around a four-hand arrangement which the composer must have thought enough of (or needed the cash badly enough) to farm out to a colleague while he was composing his late masterpiece, Jeux.
Saint-Sa”ns' 2nd Piano Concerto was aptly paired with Printemps and showed the road more traveled which the young Debussy did not take. It is a rabble-rouser, but so masterfully orchestrated that Ravel claimed to have learned everything from it. It got a dazzling performance from the magistral young Macedonian pianist Simon Trpceski, who appeared for the first time with the symphony. Equipped with plenty of technique and a wide range of color, he had a way of integrating his sound with the orchestra that gave me a new interest in this warhorse. His performance in Prokofiev's Third Concerto last year with the Santa Rosa Symphony displayed his abilities in the virtuoso concerto repertoire.
Tortelier's collaboration was almost ideal, and I only wished that he had slowed up a little for the cello tune in the second movement. He was so adept at rubato in the Debussy that I thought he would surely show us here what Parisian charm and suave are all about. The last movement's wild tarantella was appropriately dizzying and as it flew by beneath Trepceski's infallible fingers, I wished for more spiky cross-accents and more bite in the trills. We got the cross-accents, if not the trills, in an encore, an impressive dance number in shifting meters composed by a compatriot of the pianist. The Pines and the Fountains of Rome closed the program, and if anything could have surpassed the razzle-dazzle of the first half, this was it. I must confess my predilection for these pieces ever since first hearing them on the 1953 Toscanini recording. As a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, Respighi reveals himself as a master orchestrator in a class with his master; and even when things veer towards the cinematic, he keeps you on the edge of your seat. When the final blast of off-stage trumpets came at the end of Pines, Tortelier pulled out all the stops and treated us to the end of Mahler's 8th without the long wait.
(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College.)
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Simon Trpceski