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SYMPHONY REVIEW
May 20, 2005
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By Lisa Hirsch
As was apparent at the San Francisco Symphony last Friday, any performance of Richard Strauss's music has to reconcile, or try to reconcile, significant problems of emotional tone and intention. Sections written with the utmost delicacy and the sweetness of a Viennese pastry exist side-by-side with the worst kind of
overbearing musical rhetoric. A passage played with nobility and
grandeur in one performance may be merely grandiose in another, or it
may degenerate into pure bombast. It's probably easier to pull off
this balancing act in conducting the operas, where Strauss is anchored
by the libretto and less likely to put on empty displays; but even
there, Elektra, with its straightforward story of bloody revenge, is
easier to bring off well than Die Frau ohne Schatten and its various
mystical and emotional agendas.
Michael Tilson Thomas never quite found the right balance among the
disparate elements of Don Juan and Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus
Spake Zarathustra). Don Juan started off with so much cinematic energy
you could practically see Errol Flynn in the role of Don Juan,
conquering every woman in sight. The succeeding love scenes were
suitably romantic, with concertmaster Alexander Barantschik shining
in his solos. But there were persistent balance problems in the
orchestra, with too much blaring and undifferentiated noise. Some of
the sonic muddiness surely resulted from the uncertain acoustics of
Davies, but by now Thomas should be able to mitigate those problems
better than he did Friday night. Worse, the music seemed heartlessly
played, despite its abundant wit. Perhaps this was deliberate – Don
Juan can legitimately be portrayed as a stony-hearted seducer – but it
doesn't seem to be what's in the music and it left me unmoved and
unsympathetic.
Between tone poems came a performance of five of the six Brentano Lieder, with soprano Laura Claycomb. Strauss originally wrote these rarely-heard songs with piano accompaniment then, some 20 years later, created orchestral versions. The orchestration is so transparent and imaginative that, except for “Als mir dein Lied erklang” (As Your Song Rang Out to Me), it's hard to imagine them with piano. Clemens Brentano's deeply romantic poems are full of flowers and moons and birds and stars; Strauss's settings are exalted, playful, and puckish by turns. “An die Nacht” (To the Night) is a chastely erotic poem about a bridal night, and provides the soprano with a typically Straussian opportunity to soar above the orchestra, while “Amor” (Cupid) might have been put together of scraps cut from Zerbinetta's aria in Ariadne auf Naxos. Claycomb, a spectacular Zerbinetta at San Francisco Opera a few years ago, made short work of the difficulties presented by “Amor” and, indeed, did well with both the depths and heights of the other songs.
Her voice has more warmth in the middle and low registers than you'd expect from a comparatively light soprano, although that warmth also made her upper register sound a bit buzzy and disconnected from the middle. She's a charming singer and she's good at making contact with the audience – though I wish she'd done without that music stand, which did get in the way psychologically. Alas, the balances again defeated Thomas: inexcusably, the orchestra sometimes covered Claycomb, and she could rarely be heard in relief against the orchestra. Also sprach Zarathustra did much better as far as the orchestral balances were concerned, but oh, the other problems. Strauss was 33 and ambitious when he wrote his Also sprach Zarathustra, and entirely willing to impose a huge philosophical burden on the piece. While his notes for an early performance explained that he “did not intend to write philosophical music” or attempt to portray Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra literally, he did mean to “convey in music an idea of the human race from its origin, through its various phases of development…up to Nietzsche's idea of the Übermensch.” For all its prodigious technical brilliance, the music, with its fugue, its writing for multipart solo strings, its gorgeous violin solos, and its stylistic variety, never quite coheres around the extra-musical themes. To a 21st-century listener, some of it may even seem absurd: what is that lush waltz — which might be from the still-to-come score of Der Rosenkavalier — doing in the midst of all the philosophical angst about man's upward striving? Are we supposed to hear it ironically, or….? That deep, deep pedal at the opening, before the famous rising motive – maybe it's called “Sunrise,” but it's hard not to hear it as a variation on the opening of Das Rheingold. Thomas gave Zarathustra a brash performance, long on spectacular playing and dynamic extremes. (Barantschik was again a standout, as were all the first-desk strings.) Strauss provides enough bombast that a more subtle and understated performance would make a better case for the work itself.
(Lisa Hirsch, a technical writer, studied music at Brandeis and SUNY/Stony Brook.)
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Laura Claycomb
