San Francisco Classical Voice

The tiny orchestral suite Music for a Puppet Court offered more musical arcana cleverly (and successfully) disguised as neat stuff: two puzzle canons by an almost-unknown 16th-century English composer, each one presented twice: once ingeniously orchestrated but more-or-less literal, once dis- and reassembled in the kind of variation where you might miss the resemblance to the original if you weren't specifically told to listen for it. A puzzle canon isn't what we generally know as a canon (one part following another with the same notes, but a little later); as the author of the Symphony's program note, Thomas May, put it aptly, it's a sort of musical crossword puzzle. I'd add that it's the diagramless kind. You have, say, three lines of notes, and you have to figure out the rule you must follow for each to make them all harmonize when you run them simultaneously. It could be "play two beats behind that other guy" (what we think of as a "canon" now); but it could also be "take these four notes, and play them at this speed, and then at this faster one, and then at this yet faster one, and . . ." That was actually one of the rules in the second canon used in this piece, and by about the third go-round you could hardly help counting along with the horns when they came in with it. I never thought a contemporary work would make me exclaim "Puzzle canons are cool!" at a concert, but that one did. (Professors of early music: take note.)

The design of the brief four-movement piece is also ingenious, with the basically-literal orchestrations on the outside and the "varied" ones inside, so that you hear that finale in, so to speak, fancy dress before you meet it straight on. But, again, you could go through that piece completely oblivious of the design, the 16th century, puzzle canons, and the like and still find it fascinating.

The 2002 Violin Concerto is, I think, a piece with a future. It's compact, intelligible, colorful; it gives the soloist all the opportunities anyone could want, from free-form rhetorical utterance to legato lyricism to dazzling pyrotechnics, especially in the final Gigue. The only problem is going to be finding someone with the particular chops of Pinchas Zukerman (for whom it was written) to play it. (Hilary Hahn, check this out; it practically has your name written on it.) Zukerman has been rather inconspicuous as a violinist of late — spending more time conducting and teaching — but you'd never guess that from his playing, which was splendid. His legato is spectacular; his tone is deep and almost alarmingly powerful (if anyone else plays this, the orchestra will have to be shushed, because the orchestration is rather too much for most violinists to contend against); and his octaves were the kind you generally only read about in accounts of bygone virtuosi, so in tune that you could hardly tell that there were two pitches there.

Zukerman's encore was a brief rendition of the Brahms Lullaby, which I think was meant as a not-so-subtle "Nighty-night, everyone, no more out of me."

And after intermission, yet another Prokofiev Romeo & Juliet, in the MTT version (I think slightly shortened relative to the one that marked his SF Symphony recording debut). This orchestra has played that suite, and toured with it, enough that the playing must be almost automatic by now. Certainly the virtuosity was extreme, especially in the battle scenes (some of history's nastiest violin parts, nailed with breathtaking accuracy), and the performance graced with many eloquent solos from the winds and the principal strings. But I find it hard to get past the hard glitter of the piece itself, so effective and so cold (yes, even in the "balcony scene"); and MTT's arrangement of the material — ending emphatically but weirdly here with the "Death of Tybalt" — is the sort of alternative narrative I could do without.