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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Variety and Virtuosity in Balance December 6, 2001
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By Heuwell Tircuit
He's at it again. Avoiding clichés and serving the art of music beyond concerns for symphonic entertainment, Michael Tilson Thomas' Christmas present to the Bay Area is two weeks of his Mavericks programming. Last week, the San Francisco Symphony's program featured Italian “mavericks”; this week's is devoted to Pan-American works. In both cases, MTT offers his audiences festive events not likely to be duplicated anywhere in the world — nor, indeed, within anyone's lifetime. For sheer daring and good planning they are matchless.
Last week's performances opened with Claudio Monteverdi's “Sonata sopra ‘Sancta Maria,'” from his 1610 Vespro della beata Vergine, arranged for modern instruments by Lawrence Morton. This was followed by Luciano Berio's 1991 Epiphanies for soprano and large orchestra. Following intermission, there was the provocative I presagi (The Omens) of 1958 by Giacinto Scelsi and then, as dessert, Respighi's bumptious Roman Festivals. The San Francisco Girls Chorus took part in the Monteverdi piece, and the remarkable Lauren Flanigan served as soloist for the Berio work.
Thursday's performance was in every sense a Spectacular, wherein performance levels ranged between the merely excellent to the nearly unbelievable. Soprano Flanigan, for instance, has either sold her soul to the devil, or she possesses the greatest command of vocal technique and controlled timbre since Kirsten Flagstad.
During the half-hour Berio work, she sang with incredible beauty for the lyrical moments, soared through atonal coloratura filigree, shouted, spoke, raged, hissed and gestured through six languages: French (Proust), Spanish (Machado), English (Joyce), Italian (Sangumeti) and German (Brecht). All was beautifully accomplished with assurance. She moved though Berio's demands with the kind of ease one expects when hearing the average Christmas carol. And mind you, she made herself heard through all this against an orchestra worthy of Mahler in a particularly extravagant mood. The unison vocal line sung by the SF Girls Chorus is, of course, far less demanding, but the youngsters performed the Monteverdi with elegance, fine musicianship, and a keen feeling of style. All was most handsomely done, as indeed was Morton's dedicated transcription. His revised instrumentation involved bassoons, trumpets, trombones, an appropriately small body of strings and a small portable organ to accompany the choir. (After all, there aren't a lot of sackbuts around these days.) Scelsi (1905-1988) was not only a maverick in his odd music, but one of the more eccentric composers of all time. Like the 16th-century Gesualdo, Scelsi came from an aristocratic family, and was about half nuts. Extremely reclusive, Scelsi refused ever to have even a photo taken, and like some antique mountebank, delved into ancient mysticisms — notably those of obscure cultures of Latin America and Tibet. He did admit to a certain influence of Scriabin, but what came across sounded more like offbeat Varèse. Scored for pairs of horns, trumpets, trombones, tubas, percussionists plus a saxophone, I presagi consists of three terse movements, each formed around variations of a single note. No, this was not so boring as it surely must seem. The players maneuvered through some interesting textural changes, greatly aided by the composer's innate sensibility to duration.
The piece is said to have something to do with the composer's theory that the great Mayan cities were deserted because of some religious principle, which is too Romantic an idea by half. Those cities were deserted for ecological reasons, once they'd grown too large for the local agriculture and water supplies to support. And doubtless that spawned epidemics of one sort or another. At its peak in the 6th century, for example, the city of Teotihuacan — site of the great Mexican pyramids — supported a population of 180,000. And this on a high desert plateau, the only water supply being a small river not broader than the average two lane street. After two or three drought years they would have had to move on. Which all goes to illustrate the point that great art is often inspired by illusion and false notions. No matter — it's the end result that counts.
Norman Lockwood, the American composer who served as Respighi's assistant while his student, once told me that Feste romane was written to fill Toscanini's request for a blockbuster. He wanted to impress his New York Philharmonic audience with the orchestra's brilliance. Blockbuster Toscanini got a thing of delicious excess that brims with unlikely effects set within a giant orchestra. There are even big solo passages for mandolin, haunting little horn cadenzas, a battalion of percussion, an offstage trumpet section in the “Release the lions!” mode . . . you name it. Beyond all that, Feste romane constitutes a virtuoso study highlighting just how technically accomplished the players are. The string parts, for example, are furiously difficult from first notes to last. Exceptional demands are made all over the stage and indeed, this is not the easiest work to conduct. That, and the expense of all those extra musicians, likely accounts for its relatively rare outings. MTT got the piece to shine out in bursts of sunlight, with all sorts of little subtle details peering out of corners. Those little horn call cadenzas near the close of “The October Festival” could not have been finer. The orchestra covered itself with glory throughout, as it had all evening. Tilson Thomas achieved convincing levels of accomplishment in style, ensemble and balances in this memorable orchestral program of challenging works. Stunningly played and conducted with high intelligence, this concert offered pleasures at levels which are likely sinful in some religions. At the conclusion, I didn't know if I should shout “Hail Caesar!” or “Ave MTT!” (Heuwell Tircuit, composer, performer and writer, was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the SF Chronicle, previously for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.) ©2001 Heuwell Tircuit, all rights reserved |
