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Astonishing S.F. Symphony Premiere

Michelle Dulak Thomson on June 15, 2009
The San Francisco Symphony’s “Dawn to Twilight” festival ended last week with a devastating double bill. Pairing Schubert and Berg might look like the sort of juxtaposition apt to work better on paper than in the event. In Wednesday’s first concert of the festival’s final program, though, two late masterpieces (one for each composer) came together in odd synergy.
Gil Shaham

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas introduced the Berg Violin Concerto with a sort of blow-by-blow account of the piece (with snippets played by soloist Gil Shaham and the orchestra, by way of illustration). The work was last played here just five years ago — also with Shaham as soloist — and back then it was not presumed to need any introduction; MTT on that occasion saved the commentary for the first San Francisco Symphony performances of Hindemith’s Symphonia serena, which shared the 2004 program.

This concert also featured a San Francisco Symphony premiere, and an astonishing one at that. Who would have guessed that Schubert’s last and greatest Mass setting (in E-flat major, D. 950) was new to the Symphony’s repertoire? The neglect is, in a way, understandable: The piece is huge, difficult, and rather expensive to cast (five solo singers are called for, though they are silent most of the time). Still, it seems incredible that the orchestra has never programmed it before.

It’s a pity that the Berg rather than the Schubert got the directorial introduction, because the latter is one strange beast. Like a lot of late Schubert, it slips frequently into seemingly remote keys. This isn’t, though, the genial chumminess among distant tonalities that you find in (say) the “Great” C-Major Symphony or the Cello Quintet or a lot of the late songs. Here the key-slippages are shocks, and obviously meant to be shocking. The opening of the Sanctus, with four willfully jarring harmonies one after the other, is the baldest example, but the whole piece is shot through with such harmonic jolts.

There is, too, a sort of menace to Schubert’s settings of the darker parts of the text. The “Domine Deus, Agnus Dei” section of the Gloria, with its shuddering strings and tormented harmonies, has something of the uncanny atmosphere of “Der Doppelgänger” from the posthumously published song collection Schwanengesang. The final Agnus Dei, half an hour later in the piece, connects up even more explicitly to “Der Doppelgänger,” sharing with the song its tortuously chromatic four-note melodic cell.

The fugues that Schubert puts in the conventional places (the “Cum Sancto Spiritu” of the Gloria, the “Et vitam venturi” of the Credo, the “Osanna” of the Sanctus) are intricate, virtuosic, and — in the first two cases — very long, teasing out contrapuntal possibilities perhaps to excess. The Credo-ending fugue seems about to end before a large section is reprised with the voices rearranged, the better to demonstrate that not only is it a stretto (one fugue entry begins before the last has ended), but it’s also in invertible counterpoint (it works equally well with either of the two entries higher than the other).

There are, as well, moments of unearthly serenity. The opening Kyrie (without vocal soloists, like the Gloria) has something of the mood of the outer movements of Brahms’ Deutsches Requiem. (Indeed, one passage near its end is so Brahmsian that I couldn’t resist trying to find out whether Brahms might have known the piece before he wrote the Deutsches Requiem. I was gratified to find that Otto Erich Deutsch, who made the first catalog of Schubert’s works, credits the piano/vocal score of the first edition, published decades after Schubert’s death in 1865, to Brahms; the Deutsches Requiem itself is from four years later.)

Schubertian Bliss

And then there are passages of sheer Schubertian bliss, lyrical effusions of that effortless kind that you find in some of the late songs and partsongs. The “Et incarnatus est” of the Credo — a trio for two tenors and soprano in which each in turn takes up the theme while the others weave melodic tendrils around it — is one such. Tenors Bruce Sledge and Nicholas Phan, joined by soprano Laura Aikin, made a magical thing of it. (It’s too bad that Schubert gave Phan nothing more to sing but this one passage, for while the part might be brief, the young tenor, in his San Francisco Symphony debut, made an arresting impression.)

The Symphony Chorus under Ragnar Bohlin's direction was firm, well-drilled, and dynamically responsive, if occasionally a little casual about its consonants. The other soloists — mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor and bass-baritone (and 2006 Adler Fellow) Jeremy Galyon — completed a first-rate solo quartet in the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei. The orchestra, for its part, showed some faint evidence of unfamiliarity with the piece; ensemble wasn’t honed to the usual knife-edge tightness.

You couldn’t say the same of the Berg. The Symphony players were in at least as fine a form as they were five years ago, and Shaham (apart from a few minor intonation problems early in the work) was, too. There is something in Shaham’s playing that’s peculiarly suited to this concerto — a grace, a slenderness, a vulnerability unusually apt to it.

It’s a taxing thing, oddly, to give the right impression of difficulty in this music. The part is, and is meant to be, horrifically difficult, yet for the sense of emotional strain in the piece to emerge, the technical matters have to be unnervingly well taken care of. Shaham, as he did when he last played the work here, walked that line uncannily well, giving an intense impression of heroic and ultimately futile struggle, but against fate rather than his instrument or the score.

Of his accompaniment it’s enough to say that it was worthy of the protagonist. I’d single out the clarinet-quartet chorale that emerges in the second of the two movements, which gave as perfect an impression as I’ve ever heard of a chamber organ. But indeed everything was uncommonly fine — tight, dynamically and rhythmically flexible, and responsive to MTT and Shaham both. When, near the end of the work, the soloist is asked to urge the violins to join his flight, the surge from the Symphony players was a joy to behold.