San Francisco Classical Voice

March 5, 1999

John Mark Ainsley

Jeffrey Tate

Jeffrey Tate's appearance with the San Francisco Symphony Friday night displayed a subset of the orchestra in fine form and introduced the Symphony's patrons to a twentieth-century masterpiece. Nonetheless, the evening produced an ambiguous impression. The programming and the direction were equally at fault.

Astonishingly, this appears to have been the first San Francisco Symphony performance of Britten's Nocturne. The hall at intermission was filled with audience-members eagerly exclaiming over the music, as well they should have, for this is one of Britten's finest works. But also, it is one that one would have thought tailor-made for the Symphony. A small string orchestra (for which Britten writes with his customary cunning) is the backdrop against which seven soloists, mainly winds, intertwine with the tenor protagonist. What could be more apt for an orchestra like this one, with a fine core of strings, and principal winds of the highest quality?

The Nocturne is a darker sister to Britten's much-better-known Serenade, with the same theme (night) and the same trajectory (an unassuming beginning, falling into gloom and terror, then re-emerging suddenly into the light, only to end pensively with an intense setting of a sonnet). But instead of the solo horn of the Serenade, here there are seven obbligato instruments.

The tone ranges wildly, from the frothy duet of flute and clarinet in Keats' eulogy on sleep, to the bassoon's fulminations in Tennyson's Kraken (a lurid portrait of a giant squid), to the threatening timpani obbligato in Wordsworth's meditation on the French Revolution's September Massacres, followed (chillingly) by Wilfred Owen's eerie portrait of Britannia, serenely sleeping amid the maimed English dead of the Great War, accompanied by a mournful English horn. The final sonnet is by Shakespeare, at once convoluted and obscurely moving: "When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see." Here all the obbligatists take their places as members of the orchestra, and in the wake of their fullest sound comes Shakespeare's closing couplet,. to the barest accompaniment: "All days are nights to see till I see thee / And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me."

The performance Friday night was a fine one. John Mark Ainsley, the tenor, sang with excellent diction and a gently persuasive tone that was most moving; if on occasion he seemed to be struggling with the highest notes (the high A at the close of The Kraken, for example), it was an intermittent rather than a persistent problem.

The orchestra, meanwhile, did all that one could ask. The obbligato soloists were uniformly excellent, and the supporting strings (much reduced, as they were for the entire program) were incisive and vivid.

One interpretive detail disturbed me. The Symphony's usually reliable annotator, Michael Steinberg, portrays the Thomas Middleton song midway through the cycle ("Midnight's bell goes ting, ting, ting, ting, ting," with horn obbligato) as "the sorbet course in the feast, a divertimento in darkness." Its onomatopoetic depictions of nocturnal creatures might strike some as funny, but the air of dread that hangs about the entire song makes it hard to read it as a jest. Ainsley seemed to be trying to make the most comedy he could out of the various animal noises, but the effort fell flat.

The remainder of the concert was variable. Best was Haydn's Symphony No. 97, one of the seven London symphonies unfortunately lacking a nickname and (therefore) seldom played. On Friday it emerged every bit the equal of more familiar symphonies like the Surprise and the London. The first-movement development section is one of those things that is unmistakably "Haydn," after you hear it, but not at all predictable before: a little rhythmic figure pops up at seemingly random intervals throughout the strings, while the winds sail by in serene three-part counterpoint. The variation movement and the minuet, both intricately orchestrated, came off well, though it was the finale, energetic without the least heaviness or brutality, that was the highlight.

Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony, though a rewarding piece, was a strange choice to open the concert. The piece is a kind of step-child among Schoenberg's works, begun in 1906 and completed more than thirty years later. The first movement is laden with tragic import, less fierce than despairing. Then comes a second movement whose opening is almost insanely cheerful, something like the Mahler Fourth on speed. Before long, though, the various lines are twining themselves into alarming chromatic knots, and the meter veers bar by bar between two and three. At length the first-movement material returns in an Epilogue, and the music strenuously, lingeringly dies.

This performance was almost miraculously clean and unanimous, given the ambiguous signals coming from the podium. Jeffrey Tate's conducting of the rhythmically intricate sections of the score was spectacularly unhelpful. Both here and in the Britten (where the flute/clarinet section nearly ran off the rails), he seemed unable to convey where the next beat would fall in fast mixed-meter passages. Elsewhere (especially in the Haydn) he could be quite eloquent in his gestures, but where the going was tough he gave every impression of doing more harm than good.

Purcell's G-minor Chacony, in Britten's string-orchestra edition, was the fourth work on the program. The performance was a sort of paradox, full of detail (hardly a variation went by without some sort of dynamic shaping from the conductor), but still stilted and formal. It was as though showing too much strain would have been inappropriate. This listener would gladly have traded much instrumental crudity for a performance taking painful account of each of Purcell's tortuous dissonances. As it was, the Symphony's performance succeeded in making this most anguished of Purcell's instrumental works almost bland.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©1999 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved