San Francisco Classical Voice

But that in itself made it easy to trust the passagework. Bow speed and pressure and heavy vibrato are the easy ways to cover poor tuning (and, not entirely coincidentally, are the "default" approach in this concerto). Bell's light, lithe approach to particular places where it's traditional to "barrel in" were the more impressive because most of the audience couldn't know that he was thereby making things a lot more difficult for himself. Hitting (say) a fourth cleanly in a relatively quiet dynamic is much harder than doing it in forte. I began to think Bell was setting himself difficulties of that kind just for fun — throwing an open A string into a line where it couldn't help but stick out if anyone but Bell were playing (it fit into the line so well that I wouldn't have heard it had I not seen it, if you follow me), for example. Or toying around with a bit in the finale where an early edition made a cut to leave out a repetition. Even with the cut there is the same phrase practically demanding the same slide up the G string, three times; open out the cut, and you have three more. Bell saved the G string for No. 5 — a thing he could get away with because the previous four were so suave and so seamless that the fifth, with the subtlest portamento, was just an infinitesimal darkening of color.

That is the recurring marvel with Bell: he can move so easily around the instrument with so few sharp changes in color across strings. You can spin that positively as a triumphant conquest of the instrument, or negatively as a denial of the instrument's essential nature; but either way it's an uncommonly difficult achievement. It does mean a loss in terms of the violinist's characteristic "hot" sounds — the sizzling E, the throaty high-up-on-the-G, all the violinistic showman's stock-in-trade. Bell wasn't using those much Friday. His high playing on both outer strings sang out clearly and (as ever) immaculately in tune, but there was no selling buzz on it. Dare I say that that came as a relief?

So too did his mercurial approach to the score's arabesques. I don't think I've heard anyone make the first-movement cadenza sound so convincingly improvised before. Naturally, it's hard to do that with cadenzas that are built into the piece and heard over and over again, but Bell did it well — again, largely by not treating it as a "virtuoso showpiece," and lying low for some time. Every other chance he got to play around with time on the finer scale, he took, as well; and if that strain led to borderline-affectation once or twice in the central Canzonetta, it more than redeemed itself in other places.

Bell's tendency to tear through passagework at unexpected speeds is alive and well. It's to Abbado's credit that he not only kept up with his soloist most of the time, but once or twice refused to let him careen on; you'd see a significant exchange of glances and then a slight mutual checking of the pell-mell pace. (And if it was the orchestra that checked first, and a small hole opened between "call" and "response," little harm done.)

Abbado conducted, as he did throughout the evening, with a combination of precision and passion that is rarer than it ought to be, precise and clear but also expressive. That certainly served him well in the program-bracketing pieces (the Busoni and the second Suite from Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé), but where it was crucial was in Pascal Dusapin's 1994 Extenso, one of those dense and intermittently active pieces where the conductor really has to be on top of the trajectory and of the beat at once. It's a piece with a great deal of "middle" (often multiply-divided strings) waiting, so to speak, for a "top" or a "bottom" — that is, for strong lines overarching the mass of texture or underpinning it. These appear, speak (or sing), vanish again, the complex string turmoil still going on. There are some percussion outbursts, and a great deal of stuff for the trombones (who between this and the Ravel must have been having a lot more fun than they get in the average set). The piece begins with the C above middle C, and dwells on that long enough that when even the more angular melodies later on sit on that pitch for more than a second, you're half-afraid and wholly anticipating that it's going to come back.

Putting Daphnis right after this was brilliant, because that dawn scene is obviously the locus classicus of that chaotic-but-orderly middle-of-the-texture concept. Hear the strings noodling too fast to catch the pitches in the Dusapin, then hear them do the same in the Ravel! And hear themes (here as there) arising on top, or underneath, of all that burgeoning, inchoate growth. The "Danse générale" to come was acutely realized, conducted with the sort of energetic gesture that yet looks like it's meant for the players and not the audience, and with the tightest control in the quiet bits, and the impression that Abbado was paying attention to everything in the texture.

The concert may have ended with a bang, but flexibility and subtlety were the keynotes, and Abbado the catalyst. Interesting to find the San Francisco Symphony so mercurial, so adaptable. Interesting, and welcome.