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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Eroica Trio
March 9, 2007
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Sass, Class, and a Slow Tango By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Program design is a tricky thing. What looks appetizing on paper doesn't necessarily play out well in real time. The San Francisco Symphony's program last Friday, with guest conductor Alan Gilbert, illustrated one frequent pitfall: When the first thing on the program is a stunner, does the rest of the evening have a chance? The answer, in this case, was a qualified "yes," but Thomas Adès' 1990 Chamber Symphony did cast an awfully long shadow over the remainder of the concert.
The Adès, written when the composer was 19, is bratty-boy-genius music and sounds it, too. But the emphasis belongs on the "genius": If this is just a brilliant kid playing around with an orchestra, we could use a few more of such kids. The piece packs in as much sass and color as 15 minutes can hold, while also finding room for passages of surpassing tenderness.
Gilbert led a taut and energized performance that sounded as though his 15 players had been living with the music for years, rather than (as was the case) giving the first San Francisco Symphony performances of it. It wasn't perfect — the dynamics, in particular, were much more generalized than the obsessively finicky ones in the score — but the gist was there, and the gist was a blast.
Eroica Trio The Beethoven Triple Concerto, not the easiest sell even in the best of times, was therefore probably not the ideal thing to put right after Adès's exhilarating little zinger. But the Eroica Trio and the Symphony did their best for it. The trio's new violinist, Susie Parks, is a bigger personality than was her predecessor, Adela Peña, with a full, deep sound and a swashbuckling way with the bow. How the new lineup will shake out in the trio's chamber repertoire, I don't know. At the very least, it will be intriguing to watch, because Parks and Eroica cellist Sara Sant'Ambrogio are already playing in a sympathy you wouldn't expect, given their different sounds. The Triple Concerto has a mean solo part for cello, a complementary but distinctly easier violin solo part, and a piano solo part that seems humdrum alongside the other two. Sant'Ambrogio didn't exactly sail through the cello solos — she sounded strained in most of the high-lying material, and not always impeccably in tune, either. But she nailed the one thing that might matter even more than notes in this work: She was obviously having a ball playing it.
Some pieces drop dead the moment that even a hint of duty intrudes in the playing, and this is one of them. Sant'Ambrogio on Friday night could be accused, in places, of crudity, but never of dutifulness. She and Parks egged one another on to the point where it wasn't clear, in the end, who was the instigator. Their dueling sextuplets in the finale should have been videotaped as an example to young musicians and with a printed warning: "Yes, this is classical music, and it really is this much fun." The disappointment was Eroica pianist Erica Nickrenz, who got in on the fun not at all. Her part, granted, gave her relatively few opportunities. Still, Beethoven does allow the pianist room to swagger and to strut, and Nickrenz simply didn't make use of it. She looked and sounded like an accompanist to her two string colleagues. Some of that must have been the setup with the orchestra and conductor, where Parks and Sant'Ambrogio were on one side of the stage and Nickrenz, facing away from them, on the other. (The usual piano trio setup would have everyone in much closer communication, with the violinist right next to the pianist and the cellist opposite in the crook of the piano.) But some of it seemed to me a simple lack of interest in the part. It can be made interesting, I think — but you have to want to do it. The orchestra, to its credit, was uncommonly elegant and deferential to the soloists. Gilbert had the strings in particular playing with impressive finesse in quiet passages, not only while accompanying but also in the tuttis. Eroica's encore was Astor Piazzolla's Oblivion, by now an Eroica standard. Parks slotted in here quite nicely, with a slowly smoldering violin line that fit the trio's established interpretation perfectly. It will be interesting to see how she affects the ensemble's performances of bigger pieces. Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony following intermission was tight, colorful, and a bit cautious. Gilbert emphasized the winds, giving encouraging looks (repaid) especially to the bassoons. The smallish string band was neat, crisp, and almost inconspicuous by comparison. While Gilbert did bring out many small details of the texture, he glossed over some larger events that Bay Area audiences, fed on the likes of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, are by now accustomed to hearing highlighted. That place in the finale where everything suddenly becomes harmonically dislocated, for one, was disconcertingly smoothed out by Gilbert's gestures. And the coda, where all heaven breaks loose, didn't sound quite like that, either.
(Michelle Dulak Thomson 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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