San Francisco Classical Voice

SYMPHONY REVIEW

The Grandeur of Simplicity

November 20-21, 2004

Yuri Temirkanov

Lynn Harrell

By Janos Gereben

There is more to experiencing music than the black-and-white dichotomy of "good" and "bad." Among all the nuances and layers of feelings prompted by listening to Yuri Temirkanov and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic over three glorious nights on their San Francisco stopover was a sense of personal communication, the immediate certainty that "this means something" beyond entertainment, enjoyment, "a good performance." The San Francisco Symphony, producing these concerts as part of its Great Performers Series, was well rewarded by three full houses on the busy pre-Thanksgiving weekend.

For this listener in Davies Hall, there was a flashback to seven years ago, when Temirkanov made his US opera debut as conductor and stage director for the San Francisco Opera's Onegin. In the Soviet-occupied country of my youth, this opera seemed as ubiquitous as The Nutcracker is in the US during the holidays, so Onegin held little promise of a new experience for me by 1997.

But then, the curtain went up in the War Memorial, on an empty stage (an unusual and daring directorial move, setting the scene perfectly), and from the distance, the sound of the opening chorus filled the air . . . and I was hooked, found myself completely in the moment, hearing the work as if for the first time. This was Tchaikovsky himself, speaking through the music, the conductor becoming transparent, Pushkin's simple and yet deeply meaningful story unfolding without interference, nothing calling attention to the staging.

Simple, honest music-making

That was the low-key, self-effacing magic of Temirkanov then, and that's what was so striking at the concerts last weekend visibly and audibly: simplicity, sincerity, no posing, posturing, pretending. It was "prima la musica," and nothing but, a kind of purity that transcends the accuracy of notes, even though the notes were right on the money too. Going against the very grain of a conductor's occupational hazard, here is one artist who is never "imperial."

The imperial was only in the distant history of Temirkanov's band, this old orchestra of many incarnations, the Imperial Music Choir / Petrograd Philharmonic / Leningrad Philharmonic / St. Petersburg Philharmonic. It has never sounded better, not since its best days under Yevgeny Mravinsky, and even then it did not have this sound of humanity and relevance heard in Davies Hall. Some recent tours by the Philharmonic offered a mixed bag, a weak Mahler, blank, expressionless faces, a mix of good, average and even poor playing.

Two years ago, when the entire Philharmonia was kept off the plane for a while on a security misunderstanding, Yefim Bronfman played a brilliant, but mechanical, Rachmaninoff No. 3, and a super-fast Prokofiev No. 2. It was vastly different this time, all roses and daffodils — amazing, rousing, satisfying music-making. String and woodwinds singing gorgeously, the brass right out of New York or Chicago, bold and right playing from trumpets, trombones, horns.

The music, not the sound

As for Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, their music ruled the day this time, Temirkanov and the Philharmonic going on their winning ways in such transparent works as Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony and three pieces from The Love for Three Oranges; brilliant and strangely moving in Rachmaninoff's last work, the Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (a piece so easy to play on the cusp of vulgarity); unshowy but solid in Dvorák's Symphony No. 8, Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique," and the Symphony No. 5.

Consistently, Temirkanov maintained exemplary balance, steady, unrushed tempi; he made certain the orchestra eased into climactic passages rather than hitting them (and the audience) with a bang, producing a kind of legato-crescendo that kept even potentially coarse Tchaikovsky moments smooth and tasteful. Even in such moments as the Symphonic Dances' outburst of that huge, grotesque march, Temirkanov made no allowance for the easy, the cheap, the wrong. The conductor got both grand ensemble and individual work from the orchestra. Concertmaster Lev Klytchkov sounded superb in his solos, along with principal players Marina Vorojtsova (flute), Rouslan Khokholkov (oboe), Andrei Laukhin (clarinet), and Olege Talypine (bassoon).

The high points of these concerts were the concerti. By his soloists you shall know the conductor: Friday night, Vadim Repin played his heart out (and, more importantly, played from the heart) in the Prokofiev Concerto No. 1; Saturday, a musician in the Temirkanov mold of grand simplicity, Lynn Harrell, played the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 with stunning intensity and quiet power. In the long, complex cadenza, which is like no other in all music, Harrell's meditation created a hush, one of those moments when a crowded hall breathes together, becomes one. There followed a softly-singing, straightforward, heavenly encore — of Bach's Sarabande in C minor from the Fifth Suite. Ah, the grandeur of simplicity! And, at the end of the series of concerts, an orchestral encore, from, yes, "The Nutcracker." Sugar plums were dancing on the streets around Davies Hall long into the night.