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SYMPHONY REVIEW
Intense Colors, Intense Rhythm
April 26, 2001
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By John McCarthy
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony seemingly defied gravity last Thursday at Davies Symphony Hall. A program of Eastern European music, ranging from the bombastically provincial to the abstruse, was lifted aloft by a transcendent quality of performance. Only the concerto soloist took the low road.
The time for György Ligeti's music seems finally to have arrived. Atmosphères (1961), for large orchestra without percussion, is his best-known work, mainly because of Stanley Kubrick's unauthorized appropriation of the score for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Seemingly disallowing interpretation, yet inviting nuance, Atmosphères is hard to make sound like more than a study in precisions of space and density. It is a tribute to the Symphony's musicality and to its uncanny exactitude of performance that it succeeded so well.
So compelling was this performance that it was possible, for once, to hear Atmosphères minus the big "postwar radical repertoire" label usually attached to it. What came to the fore was the spiritual essence of the music. A sense of the inevitable forces of nature, at times menacing, at times quasi-hypnotic, marked this revelatory performance.
After the Ligeti, with rehearsal time being what it is these days for any modern orchestra, it made sense to program Chopin's second (F minor) Piano Concerto. After all, this is music in which the pianist has most of the fun and just about all the work. But programmed after Atmosphères, with its wealth of tonal nuance and color, Jean-Yves Thibaudet's performance of the concerto was all the more disappointing. Imparting expressive meaning to the decorative figuration in this youthful piece is among the Concerto's more severe interpretive challenges. Thibaudet was either unable to extract all the poetry that those figures contain or uninterested in trying. He took a forceful, even bratty approach to the opening Maestoso movement, playing with a hard tone and pushing ahead insistently. The accentuation in parts of the development was too regular and too obvious. The rhapsodic and melancholic slow movement, marked Larghetto, fared better, and Thibaudet played with élan. Here there was genuine emotion and expressive elegance. The spicy Allegro vivace finale, too, had moments of charming piquancy, even fun.
While Thibaudet's playing can be effortlessly brilliant, and he is capable of a delicate pianissimo, the most satisfying music-making in the Chopin came from, of all places, the wind section of the orchestra, especially from the bassoon of Steve Paulson and the clarinet of Luis Baez. One of the great works from the last decade of Bartók's life, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta demands both uncompromising precision and emotional intensity. Here Tilson Thomas and the Symphony were again at their best. It was a daring performance, full of vitality, with MTT's phenomenal precision of rhythm somehow creating a sense of flexibility rather than of rigidity or dryness. The tight control came without sacrificing symphonic "substance," and what emerged from the complex welter of sounds was idiomatic feeling. A purposeful flow characterized the opening Andante tranquillo movement, and the second-movement Allegro was distinguished by its textural clarity. Both this and the Allegro molto fourth movement were wildly exciting.
The season ended on an upbeat note, with a rousing performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. The good old warhorse got a performance filled with imaginative touches, fresh and alert. David Breeden's clarinet playing was a joy. Brahms' G Minor Hungarian Dance served as the bonbon encore. From Ligeti to Liszt, the Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas brought us, once again, back to the future. Or did we go forward to the present? (John McCarthy is a pianist and teacher. He is Director of Preparatory and Extension Divisions at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.) ©2001 John McCarthy, all rights reserved |