The beautifully restored California Theatre in San José — thanks to the generosity of David Packard — was the site for Symphony Silicon Valley’s fourth of eight programs in its 2008-2009 season. Sunday's was a brilliantly performed program, but one of such mixed styles, content, and format as to raise eyebrows.
The opening work, using a reduced orchestra of 40 players, was the Haydn Symphony No. 95 in C Minor, one of 12 symphonies written for the London impresario Johann Peter Solomon. Its presentation was the first of two commemorative performances intended to observe the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death in 1809. The work is perfect in size, proportion, content, style, and presentation. At the time that the Classical period was coming to a close, nothing better was being composed than Haydn’s symphonies.
The second movement’s theme and variation are so incredibly imaginative that listeners must stand in awe of Haydn’s compositional skill, as did both Mozart and Beethoven.
The third movement’s Minuet, a dance form that presented a fashion already almost obsolete, was getting perilously close to being the Scherzo that Beethoven made into an orchestral whirlwind. And the trio section of the Minuet consisted entirely of a cello solo, played nicely by Peter Gelfand, the orchestra’s principal cellist. The light-as-a-feather finale ended the evening’s thoughtful commemoration of Haydn.
The orchestra’s management is to be congratulated for this Haydn salute, and I wait with impatience for the eighth and final program of this season so as to hear Haydn’s magnificent "Lord Nelson" Mass, to be conducted by Jane Glover.
Premiere Not Entirely a Success
The evening’s second work was a concerto for piano by David Amram, commissioned by Symphony Silicon Valley through the generosity of Marie and Bill Bianco, and custom-built for the San José pianist Jon Nakamatsu. For this work, the orchestra was enlarged from 40 to 60 performers.
There is not the slightest doubt that Nakamatsu is a strong, world-class pianist, and the complexities of the Amram concerto acted as further evidence of his skill and compositional knowledge, the first movement being modeled after the standard concerto of the 18th century. The composition is both difficult to perform and intricate to follow. But despite all its multifaceted details, the work was a disappointment. Specifically, and at a minimum, I did not find the music compelling, and the composition appeared to be unbalanced, with very long first and second movements — the latter of which contained some lovely passages reminiscent of Gershwin’s
Porgy and Bess — counterbalanced by an extremely short final movement. The audience showed its appreciation to Amram, who was present for the affair and took a deserved bow.
But following the concerto, Nakamatsu made an unfortunate choice. Instead of playing a pleasant, nonconfrontational, and safe piano work as an encore, he selected perhaps the most magnificent Rag that Scott Joplin ever wrote, one whose thrilling rhythms and exciting syncopations brought the loudest roar and the greatest applause from the audience. The net result of this unintended confrontational encore caused a newspaper headline to flash before my eyes. It read: "Amram Plays Joplin; Joplin Wins."
The evening’s concluding work was a performance of Ottorino Respighi’s one-movement symphonic poem
Feste Romane, a blockbuster of a piece for an orchestra of gigantic size — 90 players, 125 percent larger than the Haydn symphony — that raised the roof and almost brought down the house. The opening section, which was supposed to use the kind of wrap-around trumpets that the Roman Army had in bad Hollywood movies, also presented a musical depiction of wild beasts — lions, tigers, and bears — in the Circus Maximus arena, well emulated by the low brass. You could practically hear the bears growling while being baited. The work is a brilliantly scored composition, and the orchestra had fun playing it.
Conductor Paul Polivnik handled his enormous orchestral resources most effectively, and he is quite good at managing complex rhythms. It's clear that the players find him easy to work with, a fine quality in any conductor. But I do have two cants. First, whatever Polivnik may think, Haydn is not his cup of tea, and I found his performance of the C-Minor symphony unsympathetic at times; and second, he occasionally appears ungainly and awkward on the platform. He leaned so far back once or twice that I feared he might fall over.
Organizational Challenges to Be Met
I am extremely happy to see the Symphony Silicon Valley at this high level of performance, considering how discouraged and defeated the players were at the time of the demise of the San Jose Symphony. Thanks and praise are also due, in abundance, to Andrew Bales, president of the organization. He has husbanded his resources carefully, and slowly brought the orchestra to profitability, at least at the conclusion of last season. I earnestly hope he can do it again, considering the kinds of economic pressure we are all feeling.
Among the things that he must eventually face to bring this wonderful orchestra to the next level are, first, the selection of a permanent conductor, a necessity for any orchestra of the quality of the SSV, and second, getting help in establishing better programming. Whoever is helping him now is actually hurting him.
This program's pairing of a gentle Haydn symphony with the atomic bomb of
Feste Romane shows that help is needed in program selections. In my opinion, those two pieces do not belong in the same state, much less on the same program. It is as if
Random Harvest, a 1942 gentle, beautifully depicted Hollywood love story, were being matched with the 1955 comedy
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.