San Francisco Classical Voice

Sunday's concert of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, under the baton of Hugh Wolff, was a tale of untold tales. The evening began with the San Francisco premiere of Michael Daugherty's 1999 composition Sunset Strip. As the composer informed us in his notes, the piece is a trip through the musical landscape of Sunset Strip from the 1950s through the 1990s. This pastiche of familiar sounds, tunes, and rhythms, from the brash to the banal to the haunting, is clever and hip, replete with tricks and surprises.

What was lacking in the performance, however, was the dramatic narrative, the composer's stated "reflections on the sounds and images," that would have pulled together the episodic sounds of salsa, swing, and blues into a cohesive composition rather than a random roundup of elements.

The pairing of the two lengthy Beethoven works in C major that followed was, like a meal of too many courses with the same ingredients, not a wholly successful programming idea. Andre Watts, the soloist in Piano Concerto No. 1, delivered a performance that was pianistically beyond reproach. Every note was clear and perfectly in place. Yet the music never sprang to life.

The qualities that make Beethoven important--the exuberant growth of intensity following the piano's deceptively simple entrance in the first movement, the exotic color of the descending triads in the development section, the searching tenderness of the solo opening of the second movement, and the swagger of the Turkish section in the Finale--all were glossed over.

I wanted some sense of deeper involvement, of struggle in the dramatic forging of musical ideas. Instead, what was presented was effortless craft, empty of the very labored mastery of artistic material that is the core of its substance. Only the recapitulation of the opening theme of the second movement achieved a sense of graceful and meaningful return.

Symphony no. 1 was also shorn of much of its dramatic impact. Wolff gave the impression of limiting the music to his own, very predictable choreography. Rather than following the tensional narrative, the music was reduced to a sequence of moods that generated little expectancy. Yet even within this limited scope of feeling, the opening of both the Andante and the Adagio Molto of the first movement lacked sufficient mystery. The brightly rendered Finale represented the orchestra's best effort of the evening. The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra can play in a lively and entertaining way, but it needs more energy and a more tightly focused ensemble to make a truly significant musical statement.

The most troubling element of this concert was the lack of a narrative design, of a comprehensive plan to "tell the story." It is the engagement with the dramatic action, in the arc of tensions and resolutions that unfold in a work of art, that keeps us involved with it. A great performer must understand or intuitively feel the underlying structural plan of the work and then convey that plan to the audience in such a way that the audience becomes involved with it. Surface effects, no matter how lovely, are no substitute for an elucidation of the broader scheme. Without that, what should be a compelling experience turns instead into mere diversion.

(Paul Hersh is a pianist and violist, and, since 1972, the James D. Robertson Professor of Piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music)

©2000 Paul Hersh, all rights reserved