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SYMPHONY REVIEW
San Francisco Symphony Hilary Hahn David Zinman
December 6, 2006
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Out of Place By Jeff Dunn
Imagine that you were invited to help weld a sewer pipe. You show up to the front door, ready for the job dressed in grunge with torch in hand and helmet on, and it opens, with everyone staring at you, to reveal — a wedding reception. Wrong address! That's how out of place Anders Hillborg's 1994 composition Liquid Marble seemed in the midst of Boston Pops-worthy numbers at Wednesday's San Francisco Symphony concert.
Guest conductor David Zinman began with a room-temperature cup of 1942 middle-American coffee, Aaron Copland's Music for Movies, which brewed up a suite of well-made but mostly nondescript background music from The City, Our Town, and Of Mice and Men. Then came Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto from 1945, based on scores from Another Dawn, Anthony Adverse, Juárez, and The Prince and the Pauper.
Hilary Hahn was the soloist for this highly melodious, celesta-drenched confection, which she delivered with both dogged confidence and supreme tone quality. Zinman kept the orchestra down to let the violin part do its work on the audience. Response was grateful enough to warrant a short encore, a morose movement in double stops from Eugene Ysa˙e's second solo sonata, which ends with a quotation of the Dies Irae from the Latin Mass — a hint of what lay in store right after intermission.
Hillborg, a native of Sweden, has enjoyed a banner year in the Bay Area. Esa-Pekka Salonen brought the Los Angeles Philharmonic here in May to show off, among other things, Hillborg's amazingly orchestrated Eleven Gates. The Prazak String Quartet presented the world premiere of his rapturously received first string quartet for Chamber Music in Napa Valley in November. Would Liquid Marble cement the composer's local reputation? Unfortunately, the context of the piece in relation to its earlier companions on the concert, together with Zinman's too-careful approach in tackling its challenges, led, respectively, to audience bewilderment and a less-than-optimal performance. The work should bowl down listeners as an unstoppable alien force, but the conductor kept the dynamics within an overly modest range. Furthermore, the clarinets seemed unable to master the combination of glissando and vibrato that makes the opening moments of the music sound so unearthly. Finally, the tempo and articulation of the jazzy central section, which percolates like boiling mudpots, was off the mark. If San Francisco is ever fortunate enough to hear this remarkable work again, perhaps more rehearsal time can be arranged. That the Symphony and Zinman were capable of unimpeded virtuosity was demonstrated by the closing work, Zoltan Kodály's Háry János Suite. Here the dynamic range shone out in all its glory, the brass performed with perfection, and Zinman's newfound animation on the podium seemed to inspire everyone in Davies Symphony Hall to play, or to applaud, in vigorous fashion. This last guest came to the party wearing the right clothes.
(Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and president of Composers Inc.)
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Hilary Hahn
