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SYMPHONY REVIEW Rich Viola Goodness December 4, 2002
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By Michelle Dulak
Even an orchestra of the caliber of the San Francisco Symphony has its stars; and the first of these (for many
of us, anyway) is principal violist Geraldine Walther. Wednesday's Symphony performance marked Youth Orchestra
Resident Conductor Edwin Outwater's debut conducting the full Symphony; but for part of the audience it was
mainly Walther's Concerto Set.
Walther has deservedly played a concerto with the Symphony once a year for many seasons, and it's about time
to ask why the Symphony isn't recording these for release, rather than (or at least alongside) the world's 79th Mahler
symphony cycle. Certainly the combination of her artistry and the rare repertoire she's favored (I think the
most familiar piece in recent years was Martinu's Rhapsody-Concerto) would make such a recording
valuable. At least in the Blomstedt years she did make a couple of recordings with the orchestra (Hindemith's
Trauermusik and Schwanendreher); that the orchestra should not choose to preserve some of this
rare material on CD now that it has its own label is strange.
Robin Holloway's Concerto was not written for Walther, but it might as well have been; it played throughout to
her strengths. It is lyrical, basically tonal (beginning, broodingly, in F minor; ending, gently, in F major),
cannily written so as to allow the soloist to project all the time with little strain, eloquent, intelligent.
"Contemporary tonal music" is so often quasi-cinematic slush that it's something of a shock to find a piece of
this quality, not twenty years old, making its US debut.
Walther was her usual self — alert, active, and always making That Sound, vibrant and glowing and intensely beautiful. I don't know of another violist who can put across the plain poetry of the instrument's timbre as she does. You don't find yourself wishing for the depth of a cello or the brilliance of a violin when she plays; you just want her to keep going. The Holloway was preceded by George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad. When a composer dies young, tributes to his unfulfilled "great promise" are conventional and appropriate; in this case they seem also to be true. Butterworth died in the "Great War" ("World War I" to Americans), just after his 31st birthday, and if this piece (written three years before his death) is any indication, the loss to English music was heavy. It is a lovely, brief tone poem, beginning with an extended dialogue between paired clarinets and divided violas, working up to a couple of grand climaxes that we would call "cinematic" today but were obviously something else then, and subsiding again back into silence. It sounds sometimes like Elgar at his heartiest, sometimes weirdly like early Sibelius, sometimes like nothing else from the time. The Symphony played it very well — the opening violas-and-clarinets passage was especially fine. (The Symphony violas are magnificent even without Walther.) The same held true in the all-Mendelssohn second half, where the strings in particular were at their peak — nimble and rich at once — and the winds not far behind. The opening of the "Fingal's Cave" Overture was magnificent, the lower strings dark and deep. But even better was the place towards the end where first one clarinet, then a second, enter over the pianissimo strings; the hush there was uncanny, and Luis Baez's gentle, distant solo took place against the best possible backdrop. If I say that the "Italian Symphony" got more of the same, I mean that the quality was uniformly high. It was the strings that impressed most — well-balanced, trim, powerful. (The winds were by comparison sometimes over-cautious.) Here as throughout, Outwater was excellent, obviously on top of the scores and clear and eager in his gestures. This was his debut with the Symphony (excepting his conducting the chamber ensemble in the Britten War Requiem earlier this season), and it bodes well for future collaborations.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about
music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)
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Edwin Outwater
Geraldine Walther