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SYMPHONY REVIEW
April 17, 2005
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By Kip Cranna
Herbert Blomstedt's love affair with the symphonies of Bruckner continues unabated. He's back again this month for two subscription programs at the San Francisco Symphony, and he took the opportunity to champion Bruckner on his first program, leading the sprawling Eighth Symphony in C Minor — heard Sunday afternoon. Now the Symphony's Conductor Laureate, he last conducted the Eighth here in 1995 during his last season as Music Director. Obviously still feeling well at home on the Davies Hall podium, Blomstedt was clearly having a good time, taking care never to be showy but acting steadfast and sure of himself. Steadfast doesn't always mean exciting, however.
Bruckner's spacious, ninety-minute symphony features a large, Wagnerian-sized orchestra, complete with Wagner tubas. This enigmatic work can be viewed as a long exercise in delayed gratification, as expected harmonic arrivals keep getting put off by thwarted expectations, thematic material is hinted at but waits at length for full affirmation, and stirring climactic passages flit away in a trice.
The opening movement came off the best, with captivating passages like the translucent shimmering of a violin tremolo over a plaintive oboe solo. The chief representative of Bruckner's “thwarted expectations” technique is the strangely quiet end of the wide-ranging first movement, a wispy winding-down dominated by a pungent clarinet solo. (The edition used was Bruckner's 1890 revision, in which he decided to scrap his original grand coda in favor of this muted ending, so that he could save the big finish for the last movement.)
In his second movement, a scherzo, Bruckner takes a lively page from Mendelssohn, complete with gleaming violin melodies and incisive vitality. Blomstedt's moderate tempo, however, made the movement seem endless. The effect was not one of playfulness but of a determined sense of self-assurance. In the Trio of the Scherzo, the violins were entrancing in their sinuous long lines. If the Scherzo seemed under-paced, Blomstedt's tempo for the Adagio (marked “Solemn and slow but not dragging”) was truly glacial, so that any sense of underlying pulse disappeared. His deliberately unhurried approach was heartfelt but certainly not impassioned. Despite some truly fine playing from the orchestra, the effect was one of enervation. The grand central climax, complete with cymbal crash, was thrilling when it arrived, but seemed long overdue. As if to make up for all that, Blomstedt got the final movement off to a rousing start, with his orchestral forces at full throttle. At times the expanded brass section seemed to lack integration from top to bottom, but there was no denying their sonic power. The musicians began to lose crispness of attack near the middle of this movement, but rallied for the grand brilliance of the finale's last moments, as the long-awaited assertion of resplendent C Major finally made its triumphant arrival. The concert opened with a so-so performance of the Saint-Sa”ns Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor. The Symphony's estimable principle cellist Michael Grebanier was fully up to the fiendish technical demands of this rather somber showpiece but seemed ill at ease and preoccupied at times. He poured out some richly sonorous phrases, to be sure, but there were patches of dry tone and errant pitch as well, with a general sense of understatement. Blomstedt seemed to stay in the background, and a certain tameness resulted. The broad melody of the “scherzo” section of this one-movement work was lovingly played, but it called out for more careful shaping. We might have dispensed with concerto appetizer and sunk our teeth immediately into the meaty Bruckner.
(Kip Cranna is Musical Administrator of the San Francisco Opera and teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.)
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Michael Grebanier