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SYMPHONY REVIEW
February 25, 2006
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By Alexander Kahn
Schumann's Piano Concerto is a strange beast. Rather than a virtuoso showpiece for the performer, it contains a great deal of dialogue and interplay between the orchestra and the soloist and seems rather hollow if either one of these interlocutors fails to live up to his half of the bargain. Such was the problem Saturday night at Davies Symphony Hall in a performance by the pianist Shai Wosner and the San Francisco Symphony. While the orchestra played with nuance and expression, Wosner's performance was tentative and colorless.
Wosner, a young Israeli pianist, must of course be commended for mastering the concerto. Despite the lack of flashiness, this is not an easy piano part by any means. But Wosner's playing lacked presence, with a dulled sound quality that failed to project sufficiently out into the hall. His playing was perfunctory, with little sense of the shape of the piece, its highs and lows, its moments of drama and of repose. Furthermore, Wosner failed to distinguish between Schumann's figuration and melody, resulting in a lack of a clearly audible musical line.
The San Francisco Symphony seemed not to mind the listlessness of its conversation partner and played with gusto and charm. Under the dynamic and energetic conducting of Alan Gilbert, the orchestra performed with delightful musicality and attention to detail. Gilbert consistently aimed to shape the piece as much as possible and elicited a wonderful result from the musicians. The strings played with a variety of tone colors and bowings, and the woodwind solos throughout were exceptional. The concert opened with Mystère de l'instant (1989) by French composer Henri Dutilleux. Written for an orchestra of strings and percussion, his work is parsed into 10 brief sections radically different in tempo, tone, and affect. This was its first performance by the San Francisco Symphony, and the orchestra delivered a serviceable yet cautious reading of the piece. Though the orchestra easily handled the difficulties of this virtuosic score, the performance lacked the aggressiveness and depth of tone that the composer's music seems to demand. The second half featured Schumann's Manfred Overture, a rarely heard work, and Richard Strauss' Death and Transfiguration. Again in the Strauss, Gilbert's dynamism was in evidence as he led the orchestra in an energetic and sensitive reading of this masterful tone poem. Gilbert's intense energy sometimes got in the way, however, as the piece seemed to climax a few too many times, undermining the potential impact of the final transfiguration music.
(Alexander Kahn is a Ph.D. candidate in music history and literature at UC Berkeley, where his research is focused on the Hollywood émigrés. He is also the assistant conductor of the Oakland Civic and the UC Berkeley symphony orchestras. )
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Shai Wosner
Alan Gilbert
