advance down the field
Illustration by Jeff Dunn
According to American Symphony Orchestra League statistics, if you attend a hundred concerts with one of the seven symphonies by Jean Sibelius on the program, you have less than a 3 percent chance of hearing his Fourth, written in 1911. It took more than 75 years after it was written for it to reach the San Francisco Symphony. Yet Scott Foglesong, in his excellent program notes, refers to “its status as one of the signal masterworks of the twentieth century.” What’s the disconnect here?
Tilson Thomas, to his credit, took pains to explain to the audience beforehand that the Fourth was not going to be your everyday happy-camper, audience-pleasing symphony, referring to it as “crabby,” “enigmatic,” “eerie,” and “uncanny” — even directing the orchestra to illustrate its character by playing the “challenge” of its opening four-note motive that outlines C to F-sharp, the so-called “devil’s interval,” the tritone. He then went on to describe how the work “self-consciously backs away” from everything it tries to build, which includes “icebergs cracking,” “geologic events,” and “series of war cries” — leading to “the ultimate nonending in all classical music.”
The warm-up explanations were followed by a masterly interpretation of the music that emphasized discontinuities, highlighted the tritone yelps in the second movement, and, in particular, kept to a fairly strict tempo in the funereal third movement. This latter strategy revealed to me that when most conductors slow down to wallow in the full-orchestra statement of the movement’s main theme at the climax, they are inconsistent with the thrust of the work.
Neither that climax nor any other positive gestures in the symphony are meant to be fulfilling. They are all cut off one way or another — by sudden endings of phrases, intrusions of stormy or negative moods, or references to the tritone, which undermine notions of a home key. Making the climax in psychological effect too short (but per tempo indications) is the way to perpetuate the work’s intended, lasting unease. In despair, it asks, in effect, “What does it all mean?” However unsettling the question, it was answered with sustained and lasting applause from an appreciative audience.
Yuja Wang: Strong Enough
Meanwhile, Sergei Prokofiev in effect was asking a different question in his Piano Concerto No. 2: “Are you, so-called virtuoso, strong enough to play my piece without breaking your fingers or throwing in the towel?” Needless to say, this hasn’t stopped anyone of either sex from trying. Yuja Wang, now all of 22 years old, acquitted herself better than most in my experience. I expected her to go down in the cadenza, which, while leaving the soloist unaccompanied for more than 40 percent of the movement, mercilessly exposes her to a cornucopia of digital booby traps.
The biggest trap of all is that a smooth and heartfelt melody must run through the mélange of technical fireworks. Wang got her priorities right and defied my expectation. She kept the melody flowing properly with a real sense of poetry, yet also displayed the requisite power when necessary (Prokofiev marked one blowout passage, for example, colossale, or “colossal”). The only way to do this (with two hands — a second pianist would solve the problem, but that would be cheating) is to slow down imperceptibly at crucial hurdles such that the beat is not overly compromised. Most pianists lose the thrust of the tune in the cascades of notes and insert awkward half-second breaks in order to get their hands in place.
Wang, in a gorgeous red dress and sensational streaked broomstick hairdo, handled the second and third movements with aplomb, but did not match best of breed (Horacio Gutiérrez, Yefim Bronfman, and Vladimir Ashkenazy) in the concluding fourth movement. The main theme starts with four notes (similar to those in Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony, by the way, played here in Davies a few weeks ago). They are hidden in a blizzard of running notes and, unfortunately in Wang’s case, did not emerge audibly all the time. But excepting this error, which is possibly like dropping an extra piton while climbing up El Capitan backward, Wang was marvelous, receiving tumultuous applause at the conclusion to end the concert.
"Besides" Themselves With Pleasure
An almost equal tumult greeted composer Mason Bates before intermission at the end of his new suite, commissioned by the Symphony, The B-Sides. According to Bates, its five movements, none longer than five minutes, offer “brief landings on a variety of peculiar planets” and are “unified by a focus on fluorescent orchestral sonorities and the morphing rhythms of electronica.” A DJ artist as well as composer, Bates refers to “the forgotten bands from the flip side of an old piece of vinyl” as the inspiration for the title.
While hardly profound, and probably unlikely to endure as long as the other works on the program, B-Sides is impressive in many respects. It is communicative. Its evocative movement titles (“Broom of the System,” “Aerosol Melody (Hanalei),” “Gemini in the Solar Wind,” “Temescal Noir,” “Warehouse Medicine”) are borne out by the narrative character of the musical discourse. The orchestration is fresh. The music is concise: Bates reins in minimalist tendencies so as not to let any of his fine ideas outweigh their welcome. The “Aerosol” movement sports an ingratiating clarinet melody. Bates — a given, considering his DJ background — has an inventive sense of rhythm that immediately sets toes tapping.
But most important, Bates has succeeded in incorporating synthesized computer sounds into the orchestra without dominating the show and delegitimizing conventional contributors to the soundscape. He makes the case for computer capabilities merging into the orchestra in the face of the reverse trend also going on today: orchestral capabilities merging into the computer. Both at the Wednesday rehearsal I attended and the Friday concert, the audience was buzzing with pleasure at the result. More than once I heard people exclaim, “I don’t usually like this modern stuff, but ....”
Bates has made the latest play toward the next first down in musical history, just as Sibelius and Prokofiev did with their respective envelopes. Yay, team!