San Francisco Classical Voice

For more than two weeks Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony and guest artists have brilliantly surveyed the life and compositions of Igor Stravinsky, the century's most versatile classical composer. But in so broad a survey, not surprisingly, the whole of the daring and exhilarating festival was better than some of its parts.

The final program - "Stravinsky in America" - conducted by MTT in Davies Hall on Friday, consisted of a very full and mixed bag of lesser works. In choosing them, MTT seemingly disregarded W.S. Gilbert's observation that, "When all you have is bonbons to eat, you long for simple beefsteak."

The first half of Friday's program was a surfeit of bonbons. Wisely, MTT bound the pieces together with witty and informative commentaries from the podium. He hinted at how one genius could compose works for everyone from Barnum & Bailey's dancing elephants to Woody Herman and could convert what was originally intended as a wartime propaganda film score into a big band number for Paul Whiteman.

First was Stravinsky's once-revolutionary harmonization of The Star Spangled Banner, which in 1944 got the soon-to-be-naturalized composer briefly detained by the Boston police. Then the Circus Polka (staged by Balanchine, no less) with elephantine winds and percussion. Also programmed: the first San Francisco performance of the short, jazz-influenced Preludium, the Scherzo a la russe (for Whiteman), the Scenes de ballet for impresario Billy Rose and the Ebony Concerto, the later recorded by Stravinsky and Benny Goodman.

Individually and as sections, the orchestra musicians performed with spirit and brilliance. Trumpets, horns, bassoons, saxophones and strings took center stage briefly and then interacted with each other. Blocks of dissonant chords alternated with quiet passages from a solo trumpet, two horns and three violins. The restrained solo part in the concerto was played stylishly by orchestra clarinetist Luis Baez.

The most ingenious and interesting work of the evening was the score for the ballet Agon, commissioned by Balanchine for the New York City Ballet. One might argue, however, that the brilliant manipulation of compositional know-how here is if anything too self-consciously clever, comparable for example to much of the writings of Colombian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Beginning with a Baroque style fanfare, the Agon score of seventeen brief musical moments is a round trip from the diatonic to a personalized version of Webern-like serialism--which Stravinsky had recently picked up under the influence of his colleague Robert Craft--and back again.

MTT brought out the eloquent interrelationship between sound and silence and drew out fine choruses of brasses, buzzing woodwinds, a flutter-tonguing trumpet, pizzicato strings, a xylophone flourish, and trombone duets with assorted instruments.

The beefsteak at the end was the Symphony in Three Movements, completed in 1945 and performed here as recently as two months ago during the main season. MTT said then that in this work Stravinsky "takes no prisoners," particularly in the outer movements. Indeed, the first movement was partly inspired by wartime newsreels of scorched earth policies in China and the third by goose-stepping German soldiers whose defeat is celebrated at the end.

This is a musical stew that incorporates original music and passages Stravinsky first wrote for other purposes, including a never-completed piano concerto and part of a never-used score for the film The Song of Bernadette. Not much here of the neo-classicism of the more refined Symphony in C. This is earthy drama often akin to the famous ballets, particularly The Rite of Spring. What it lacks in thematic development and harmonic unity it makes up for with driving motor rhythms, syncopation, dissonance.

MTT and the orchestra repeated their heady Dionysian interpretation of April, though one sensed a little burnout by the end, as if the musicians too had not quite digested all those bonbons.

(William Ratliff, a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University, is A former music critic of The Peninsula Times Tribune and stringer for The Los Angeles Tomes and Opera News.))

©1999 William Ratliff, all rights reserved