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S.F. Symphony Welcomes Spring With a Flourish

Steven Winn on March 28, 2017
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony | Credit: Bill Swerbenski

The San Francisco Symphony ushered in spring with video footage of the four seasons and a work for tuba and orchestra about a lusty god having his way with a nymph. What might have seemed a cabinet of curiosities proved to be a stimulating and cunningly designed program that enacted music’s capacity to evoke and narrate, amuse and captivate, ravish and provoke — all done in a fresh cascade of brilliantly deployed orchestral color.

Heard Friday, March 24, at Davies Symphony Hall, the bill opened with The Seasons, John Cage’s lushly pointillist score for a 1947 Merce Cunningham dance work. Discussing the music-cum-video approach in brief remarks from the podium, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas called it an “installation.” He compared it both to the Symphony’s SoundBox concerts and to the multimedia experiments of his New Work Symphony in Miami.

Right away, with the string-and-harp shivers and gleaming, hard-edged brass of the opening Winter section, the performance needed no explanation or justification. MTT has championed this 15-minute work — it was last performed here only two years ago — and it’s not hard to hear why.

Cage uses the sparest but most suggestive means to summon the seasons to the senses, without resorting to any labored musical scene painting. Spring comes in whirling woodwind figures that spread and thicken like frantic new growth. The humid, swooning strings sprawl out in Summer, the attempts at lyricism falling wearily, peacefully away. Fall brings pungent brass and a decisive, percussive march toward Winter’s return. The musicians captured the shifts and nuances with sure-handed sensitivity throughout.

Clyde Scott’s video projections, which flowed across foresail-like screens, worked best in their abstract, painterly mode. The warm yellows and oranges of Summer slowly morphed from Rothko-like blurs to boxy, Josef Albers patterns and back again. The snaking green lines of Spring had some of Brice Marden’s undulant bloom. Less successful were the close-up images of instruments (a section of a flute, clarinet keys, brass whorls), which worked against the more natural imagery. No one needed to be reminded of what we were hearing and how those entrancing sounds were being made. Lighting designer Luke Kritzeck supplied a superfluous forest of stem-like trees, which looked like so many computer modems sprouting up among the players and their music stands.

Robin Holloway | Credit: Charlie Troman

British composer Robin Holloway is another MTT favorite. The orchestra has performed numerous of his works over the two decades, including a viola concerto, a commissioned orchestration of Debussy’s En blanc et noir, and premieres of two concertos for orchestra — the latter a relevant touchstone for this program, which concluded with Bartók’s famous work in that genre.

There are shades of Debussy in Holloway’s new tuba-centric work, a “concertante” titled Europa & the Bull. Co-commissioned by the S.F. Symphony and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, this vibrant, sometimes comic, and consistently engaging work invokes other composers, from Hindemith to Alan Hovhaness, over the course of its seven movements or episodes. The story, drawn from Ovid, relates the myth of Jupiter assuming the form of a bull to court, in cosmically amorous fashion, the nymph Europa, resulting in the continent that bears her name.

Soloist Jeffrey Anderson, the orchestra’s principal tuba, made the most of his rare day in the spotlight. Seated on a stage left platform, he made the bull’s first subject, over the chortling low woodwinds and basses, jaunty bordering on premature ecstasy. It was a funny and very human preview of passion’s way of getting ahead of itself.

Jeffrey Anderson

By turns throaty and coy, agitated and becalmed, a character emerged in Anderson’s splendid performance. Even at its highest, singing reaches, the tuba does remain an earthbound creature. It was in the aspiration, the almost sexual tension of an instrument trying to be something it’s not, that Holloway’s Europa was touching as well as frankly tumescent.

The orchestra, under Thomas’s firm, clear hand, both celebrated (in two lyrical pastorales) and mocked (with snickering trumpets) this tale of seduction and conquest. The 20-minute piece moved sideways at times, treading water in its Hovhaness-like moments of wondering contemplation. But the piece has a strong and supple spine, alive with both muscular rhythms and a rippling, well-orchestrated physique. How fitting that the composer, nimble as can be at age 73, sprinted down the aisle and came onstage to accept the ovation, hugging both Anderson and the tuba to laughter and applause.

The second half of the program was given over to Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, a marvel that can never be heard too often. As a rotating-star showcase for the musicians, this performance didn’t disappoint. From the sly oboes and self-effacing clarinets to brass choirs that seemed to bristle and glimmer, everything was wonderfully characterized. It was if the Holloway narrative had turned them all into musical actors.

If there was a measure of pungency sacrificed here and there, and an Elegy that didn’t quite mourn as deeply as it might, Thomas led a performance of fluidity, high voltage, and gathering excitement. The Shostakovich quote was a full-throated taunt. The Finale had laughs, ethereal harps, and a woodwind interlude so tender it hurt to hear it end.

But there was always the propulsive fugue to be answered. Thomas dialed the tension up and down with such command a listener might have sworn another horned animal had been let loose in the hall. The climax was a dead-on bull’s-eye.