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SYMPHONY REVIEW
November 28, 2003
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By Michelle Dulak
The usual orchestral concert puts the piece with the largest band at the end of the program. The San Francisco Symphony's set last
week did the reverse, with the full forces for the first work (Marius Constant's 1988 orchestration of Ravel's Gaspard de la
nuit), fewer for the next (Saint-Saëns' third Violin Concerto), and fewest of all for the finale (Haydn's Symphony No.
103). In that odd mix it was perhaps the Haydn that came off best, but not by much.
Ravel orchestrated so much of his own music that it's not unnatural to find others thinking the remainder fair game. That said,
Gaspard de la nuit was a quixotic choice. It's not just that Ravel himself set the bar pretty high; or that the music is
especially difficult to orchestrate. (As a matter of fact, Constant did a very creditable job of orchestrating Gaspard,
taking his instrumentational cues — as far as I can tell — mainly from Daphnis.) It's that Gaspard was
designed to be almost impossible to play, and orchestrating it removes the whole romance of near-impossibility. It's a little like
arranging the Bach Chaconne for violin duet.
Still, Constant's Gaspard is brightly and yet subtly colored. As orchestration, it's marred only by his insistence on
getting in every last legato line in the original as a legato line in the orchestration, which makes for some clotted textures in
places where Ravel was presumably counting on the piano's natural decay to thin things out. Otherwise it is all good sense —
the sweeping harp in "Ondine," the tolling bell (of course) in "Le Gibet," growling low woodwind and snarly brass in "Scarbo." The
Symphony's performance was meticulous and brilliant; but even so it didn't quite avoid the question, "Why?"
Haydn symphonies are pretty rare chez Davies, and when they are performed it's almost always by guest conductors (the last Haydn symphony actually conducted by Tilson Thomas with the SFS, as far as I can recall, was the early, diminutive No. 21, five years ago or so.) Neale's "Drumroll" seems to be it for the 2003-4 season. What to say about a performance wreathed about so with good intentions? Speaking as a long-time Haydn lover, I wanted very much to enjoy this "Drumroll." In fact, of course, there was a good deal to enjoy; there was Haydn. He isn't quite as indestructible as Bach; still, you have positively to work at it to kill a London Symphony. But it was sad to hear so fine an orchestra miss so many opportunities. The performance was curiously flat and plain. Take anything — take, for example, the opening four bars of the first movement's Allegro. Two two-bar phrases, inflected identically, and with the phrase-ending pair of eighth notes exactly the same. The phrases aren't the same. They peak in different places; and since they're halves of a four-bar phrase they shouldn't be treated by themselves anyway; and the second eighth ought to fall off from the first. Or, if not, there ought to be a point being made. There wasn't.
It was the same throughout: generically excellent playing, really about as good as anyone could want in a technical sense, just without the fun. (Actually, it wasn't quite technically immaculate. The violins seemed to be blindsided by the fast tempo of the slow movement, rather oddly given that it was the second performance; and they had some trouble holding to the slowish tempo of the Minuet as well.) Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik's solo towards the end of the second movement retrospectively set the tone: fast, slick, glib. I was reminded, inadvertently, of the sort of young string quartet that programs a Haydn quartet as an "easy" opener and figures that this comparatively "primitive" music will take care of itself. To audiences starved for Haydn this performance must have been as water in the desert. To me, fresh from Simon Rattle's fascinating Symphony 88 three nights back, and with a long memory of Philharmonia Baroque Haydn performances past to draw on, it seemed a positive dereliction of duty.
As for Elmar Oliveira's brutal Saint-Saëns Third Concerto, it was a shock to one who had heard him only through recordings more than a decade old. His greatest asset then was a deep, vibrant, throaty sound. So it is now; but then it was but one arrow in the quiver, and now it seems to be the only arrow left. Judging by Friday's performance, Oliveira has one sound — the kind you would call "hot," powerful and intensely vibrated. Also one patented slide, copied rather obviously from Heifetz. Also a dynamic range that bottoms out, rarely and briefly, at mezzo-forte. The perverse result was that the passages that actually needed the hot sound and the juicy portamenti and the power merely sounded like more of the same. Playing that might have been genuinely impressive (actually, a good fraction of it was genuinely impressive, as violin playing) was buried in a non-stop squeeze-out-the-sound marathon that did in every delicate moment — yes, there are some — in the score. Add to that the erratic intonation and the more erratic rhythm — every bit of passagework seemed to provoke a headlong surge that Neale followed as best he could — and you have a pretty mess of a performance, redeemed only, and barely, by the indestructible tunes.
(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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Elmar Oliveira