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SYMPHONY Pushing and Pulling 10/12/02
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By Thomas Goss
Great Parts do not always add up to a Great Sum. Lunch at Sardi's may well be spoiled by a subsequent afternoon of downhill skiing. From the sunny nest of a lounge chair on the deck of a Mediterranean cruise ship, the latest thriller by Sue Grafton in your lap may just prove a tedious distraction. Thus it was with the Santa Rosa Symphony's season opener on Saturday evening. Disparate ecstasies and strengths proved ill-matched, though the quality of the effort was first-rate.
The great parts in this equation were indeed formidable. John Adams was featured as conductor for a first-set program of the Party Scene from Aaron Copland's opera The Tender Land, and Adams' own Century Rolls. Jeffrey Kahane appeared as piano soloist in the Adams, then led the orchestra in a captivating reading of Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony. The players of the Santa Rosa Symphony were in top form, with resonant, integrated strings, and clear, compelling winds and brass.
Yet fundamental problems undermined the concert. Rachmaninoff's symphony had little to offer either in complement or contrast to the Adams and Copland. A piece by Walton or the Second Symphony of Howard Hanson might well have followed the first set with better style and more informing substance. At issue too was Adams' own style as a conductor as opposed to the receptiveness of the Santa Rosa Symphony. That group, even more than other local orchestras, returns the best results to a conductor who leads with intimacy and synergy, both of which Adams lacked at crucial moments.
Adams' sense of showmanship was healthy and abundant, however, and his conducting of the Copland was wonderfully spare and American in its directness. In his Century Rolls, he led the orchestra with an alert and good-natured if businesslike air. In revealing the strengths of the piece, it was a good approach. The punchiness of the third movement, the hypnotic groove of the first, and the closely guarded sentiment of the second were all revealed in high definition, and worth studying for future interpreters. The star of Century Rolls was Kahane, whose robust full-fingered approach revealed this extraordinary work's strengths and weaknesses. In the first movement, he seemed to lead the orchestra from inside the music, bypassing Adams' gestures in the energetic yet poetic groups and subgroups of rhythm and tone. That very excellence exposed the dangers of leading off a concerto with a moto perpetuo, wherein the constancy of mood and tempo binds the soloist into a framework which cannot swell, shrink, accelerate or let go. By the time the whimsical bridge to the second movement kicked in with its pointillist blips of new-age figuration, the sense of relief felt forced rather than inherent. But Kahane's playing was free and uncontrived, finding the soul inside the chilly little wandering motives that trickled down to the gently swishing Gymnopédie at the heart of the movement. And in the third movement's crazy kaleidoscope, he kept on top of the music with an approach that recalled both Artur Rubenstein and McCoy Tyner in the controlled aggression of the left hand. That movement especially underlined the necessity of a firm hand at the baton, both on stage and in rehearsal. Sections of music unraveled from time to time as players struggled to navigate the syncopations, a clear sign that Adams needed to work these sections more fully before showtime. But whether it was in search of complete acuity or in response to the sheer excitement of the music, the players seemed completely on, with Kahane fluttering and flashing, crunching the keys like "Heart and Soul" with a dose of Shostakovich while the orchestra bopped off the downbeats. The finale, though it rolled steadily to the end with little sense of surprise, was effective all the same. The sense of musical brotherhood and amity between Kahane and Adams was palpable at the curtain calls. It must have seemed like a long way from the San Francisco Conservatory in the late 70's where they first met.
(Thomas Goss is resident composer for Moving Arts Dance Collective, is a member of New Release Alliance Composers and the Cabaret Composers Consortium, and sits on the steering committee of the Bay Area Chapter of the American Composers Forum.)
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