San Francisco Classical Voice

Of course, Lenny was a pianist, and Gilbert is a fiddler. Indeed, while at Curtis, he sometimes filled in as substitute violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti. However, conducting currently absorbs him and he is chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic — the orchestra with which Herbert Blomstedt made his debut. Next summer, Gilbert becomes music director of the Santa Fe Opera.

With so solid a background, first class music making should be expected and that's what he delivered. Be it the perfumed Romanticism of Chopin, the glitter of Smetana's fugal overture, the avant-gardish devices of Hillborg's genuflection toward Sibelius or the sheer mass of Scriabin's thunder, all was well, safe and in good hands. If I were to carp at anything, the lyrical moments in the Smetana could have done with a tad more warmth. That was only a minor disappointment in a generally handsome presentation.

Gilbert is to be thanked for breaking with the snobbish neglect of the overture form by most conductors. So many fine works are no longer encountered in live performance. Opera overtures are not in the buzz (pace, Weber and Rossini), and even the finest of the concert overtures, with the rarest exceptions, no longer show up on program lists. Those are almost always one-movement symphonies, often containing some of the composer's finest ideas.

The major event of the evening turned out to be what Gutiérrez accomplished during the Chopin E Minor Concerto. He's always been a solid, reliable artist, but this amounted to a revelation of mature refinement. In music, the devil can hide in the details, but so can the glories. Gutiérrez' attention to precise dynamics, variety of timbre, exactitude of staccato playing, suave pedal usage and tasteful rubato reminded me of Emil Gilels.

The use of rubato is a necessity in Chopin. But that can easily slip over the edge into the bad flavor of rancid sentimentality. Rubato is as tricky as raw egg yolks: one slip-up and you've a real mess on your hands. And the horrid thing is that good rubato cannot be taught. You can do it artfully — feel it, if you like — or you can't, and that's all there is to it.

Gutiérrez was superb at every turn, never formulated or contrived. That, and the sheer beauty of his ultra quiet passages, wonderfully shadowed by Gilbert in every detail, were outstanding. The curious thing was that the traditional ungainly orchestration of Chopin's concertos, likely the work of some theater hack, seemed curiously smooth and effective. I found myself wondering if Gilbert's editing were at work, or the orchestra had been playing the fine revisions of Alfred Cortot's edition — made with a bit of help from Furtwängler. (They left the piano part as written but greatly modified the orchestra, even adding counter-melodies and such.)

Hillborg, born in 1954, has been winning major prizes and commissions in Europe. Exquisite Corpse was commissioned to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. The audience took to it with genuine enthusiasm, as indeed they should, since it offered pretty much the expected sounds throughout. Lasting about a quarter hour, Exquisite Corpse is scored for large, basic triple-winds orchestra with an expanded percussion section.

The piece opens in soft unison, spreading into clusters as its volume increases, often in busily jittering clusters à la Ligeti. There were some hints of the swirls favored by Bartók and Hovhaness along the way, before the second section, a pounding ostinato of loud percussion over the orchestra, went on its minimalist trek. That might be linked to Hillborg's associations with rock, but the effect struck me more as science fiction movie music of the past 30 years. He may have seen ET a few times too often.

Finally, there was an extensive quiet coda based on a metamorphosis of the opening slow hymn in the Sibelius Seventh Symphony. That constitutes an act of homage to Sibelius, the source of the music's title. Indeed, the Sibelius Seventh shared the same program with Hillborg's premiere. Exquisite Corpse is not at all a bad or tedious work, only I found it a bit lacking in real individuality. My impression is that Hillborg was too concerned with pleasing.

The Scriabin tone poem, sometimes called his Fourth Symphony, saw the SFS up to it's super virtuoso level. Gilbert had the orchestra playing its heart out, brimming with glamor, excellent ensemble, fine dynamic variety and keen articulation. I don't see how it could have been better played.

Without such performance qualities, the piece can sound like merely a confused blob of exoticism. But Scriabin's orchestral works, tricky as they are, deserve more honor than they normally receive. The last two tone poems (Ecstasy and Fire) were far ahead of their time, and better orchestrated than most of their contemporary works. When one gets a sympathetic conductor like Gilbert, with an orchestra of unified quality, these pieces stand a chance.

I only hope the Symphony will invite Gilbert back; Gutiérrez as well. Few conductors can make so satisfactory a whole out of what would seem to be a hodgepodge of repertory.