San Francisco Classical Voice

The San Francisco Symphony opened its program Friday with satisfying if slightly soporific Wagner and closed with electrifying Stravinsky. In between, baritone Thomas Hampson sang Mahler and Debussy with uneven results.

Music director Michael Tilson Thomas is no fan of Wagner, so it is not surprising that when he decided to include the composer on a program he chose Siegfried Idyll, the birthday gift the composer gave his wife in 1870. When composing this chamber score, Wagner must have been thinking of his one-year-old son Siegfried or the spineless "tra-la-la" operatic Siegfried (in Anna Russell's version) who remains after a night on the rocks with Bruennhilde.

Still this Siegfried Tamed is a charming piece not calling for much passion. The orchestra's performance was precise and transparent, the strings were full and warm and William Bennett's oboe was haunting.

Hampson was both an inspiration and a disappointment in both Mahler's orchestral song cycle Songs of a Wayfarer, inspired by the composer/conductor's love affair with the beautiful soprano Johanna Richter, and Debussy's orchestral songs, Trois ballades de Francois Villon, with texts by the 15th century French poet and scoundrel.

The soloist had an impressive technique, easily producing smooth, warm vocal sounds in a wide range and clearly enunciating the German words. But he often failed to put these talents at the service of a sensitive and moving interpretation. This was particularly regrettable in the Wayfarer, the greatest work of Mahler's early career, where the composer carries his heart on his sleeve.

One of the joys of the Wayfarer is its brilliant orchestral score, some of it known widely because of its inclusion in the composer's First Symphony, from the same period. Both Tilson Thomas and the orchestra--from strings to wind soloists--caught Mahler's melancholy with warm, delicate, powerful passages, varying tempos and textures generally.

The Debussy ballades ranged from dramatic to contrite to raucous, with the colorful orchestration one expects from Debussy. Hampson seemed somewhat more committed to these songs, which have been over-touted as the essence of the composer's genius. The orchestra alone played Debussy's short, sweet encore-type piece La Plus que lente with suitable lilt.

Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements was the bedrock of the program. As conductor Tilson Thomas noted in one of several short commentaries to the audience--he picks up the microphone as readily as he does the baton--in this work Stravinsky "takes no prisoners." The rousing performance anticipates an entire Stravinsky festival two months from now.

Indeed, Stravinsky took few prisoners in several of his early scores, most notably The Rite of Spring. The Symphony is a late work, produced after the composer had tried out a variety of other styles, but it has the sound and beat of the early ballets. It is in fact a stew that incorporates original music and passages Stravinsky first wrote for other purposes, including part of a never-used score for the film The Song of Bernadette.

Short on thematic development and harmonic unity, this symphony consists instead of patch-work movements that hang together and fascinate because of the inherent brilliance of the individual parts. The first and third movements in particular have strong traces of Rite and other earlier works in their jagged rhythms and themes, their textures and instrumentation. All the sections of the orchestra rose to numerous challenges, including the piano and percussion. Here for almost the first time all evening, Tilson Thomas conducted with real gusto.

The orchestra played the perfect encore after all this, the wild music of the demon Kashchey from The Firebird.

(William Ratliff, a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University, is a former music critic of The Peninsula Times Tribune and stringer for The Los Angeles Times and Opera News.)

©1999 William Ratliff, all rights reserved