Near-Reckless Brilliance

Michelle Dulak Thomson on May 6, 2008
There's a certain satisfaction to be derived from designing a program that combines a narrow focus with enough variety to work as an actual concert, and I imagine that San Francisco Symphony Associate Conductor James Gaffigan was modestly proud of the one he and the orchestra brought off Thursday afternoon. On paper the focus was, in one way, laser-tight: three works of Russian composers, all dating from within a few years of one another in the 1940s. But when one of those is Shostakovich's arduous, anguished First Violin Concerto, another Rachmaninov's splashy Symphonic Dances, and the third Stravinsky as orchestrator giving his best Tchaikovsky impression, the commonalities seem engulfed by the vast differences of milieu, style, and substance. Indeed, the greatest audible commonality Thursday may have been the disciplined brilliance of the playing, both of the Symphony players and of the soloist in the Shostakovich, violinist Vadim Gluzman. Not long ago the Shostakovich First was rarely played, but it seems lately to have joined the small clutch of 20th-century concertos every young violin soloist is expected to know. It is a demanding and largely bleak work, dominated by two sizable slow movements and strikingly, if darkly, scored. As one of the pieces Shostakovich shelved for a time around his harrowing travails in 1948, and as (I think) the first of his works to use the “DSCH” motto theme that was to become so familiar in his later works, it occupies a pivotal place in the composer's output. (I hesitate to quibble with an annotator so august as Michael Steinberg, who wrote the Symphony's program note, but it's not quite right to say, as he does, that the winds in the second movement of the concerto announce the “DSCH” theme. “DSCH” — the notes D, E-flat, C, and B-natural, in German usage — ends with the downward half step between C and B, while the winds' four-note motif ends with a downward whole step. You do hear “DSCH” — transposed, yet with the right intervals — in the concerto, but only three times: once at the very end of the second movement and twice in the cadenza, and all three times only in the solo violin part. To me that seems significant.) Gluzman stepped in as soloist in the Shostakovich after the originally scheduled Vadim Repin canceled. The two have more in common than the coincidence of their first names. Gluzman has studied with Zakhar Bron, the Novosibirsk-based violin pedagogue among whose pupils Repin and Maxim Vengerov are perhaps the best-known. I didn't catch Gluzman's recent Tchaikovsky Concerto with the Marin Symphony (see the SFCV review here). I was kicking myself for that omission once the enthusiastic reports of various members of the orchestra began filtering back to me. Hearing Gluzman's fine new recording of that work, which hit the street immediately afterward, only made the regret keener. (The disc, containing the Glazunov Concerto and the three pieces of Tchaikovsky's Op. 42 Souvenir d'un Lieu cher in addition to the Tchaikovsky Concerto, is BIS SACD-1432; you can listen to excerpts online here.)

Cord of Sanity

The rich, dark tone and sinewy strength of Gluzman's recorded Tchaikovsky were also the glories of Thursday's Shostakovich. The violinist took this assignment at relatively short notice. That he had recourse to the printed music in concert would seem to suggest that he was not yet entirely at ease with the score, but you would never have guessed as much with your eyes closed. In the slow first and third movements, Gluzman's deep, concentrated sound and the powerful evenness of his bowing were striking. There was relatively little of the self-conscious vulnerability some violinists have taken to exhibiting in this music. Gluzman's protagonist appeared to be beset by great sorrows and anxieties, but not actually reduced to an emotional wreck. A cord of sanity and strength ran through the playing, however hysterical the music grew. That made the enormous third-movement cadenza, for example, more straightforward, less ruminative than it often is, but at the same time more cogent. What it lacked in artful local inflection was more than made up for in emotional directness and urgency. The same went, indeed, for both the slow movements themselves. I admired in particular Gluzman's way with the opening “Nocturne,” where he conveyed the impression of (if you will) resolutely purposeful wandering as well as any violinist I've heard. I was reminded there of the concerto's dedicatee, David Oistrakh, whose recorded performances of it give that same impression of inner solidity. As an approach to the slow movements, it has the additional merit of making the other two movements seem less gratuitous, less incongruous. Gluzman was breathtaking in the fast movements, slashing of attack and hurtling forward at speeds that would have seemed reckless had he not been in such evident technical control. The orchestra dug into Shostakovich's rich, reedy sonorities with relish, though they were not always in perfect coordination with the solo violin. Gluzman left conductor Gaffigan momentarily in the dust once or twice in the fast movements, and in the great third-movement passacaglia, too, minute disagreements were heard between the solo violin line and one or another of the wind lines.

On the Wing

If the Shostakovich performance made the rest of the program seem comparatively pale, that's no fault of the playing. The opening bonbon, Stravinsky's 1941 orchestration of the “Bluebird" pas de deux from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, proved to feature Stravinsky the able mimic more than Stravinsky the ironic, distancing appropriator of older music. This is not so surprising, given that it was written to slot into a performance of the Tchaikovsky score (parts of the ballet were long available outside the Soviet Union only in piano reduction). Apart from the necessary reduction of the orchestral string sections to pit-orchestra dimensions (here they were five violins on a single part, four violas, three cellos, and two basses) and the addition of a piano, Stravinsky stuck plausibly close to Tchaikovsky's own manner. The Symphony players, led appealingly by principal flutist Tim Day in the part of the eponymous Bluebird and seconded by clarinetist Luis Baez, were bubbly, lithe, and graceful. So was Gaffigan at their helm, perhaps to excess: I don't think I've ever seen a conductor give such meticulous, dancerlike attention to the way line flows from his arms through his wrists to his fingertips. It looked most elegant from the back, but I wonder how easy it is to follow. As for Rachmaninov's big, brawny Symphonic Dances, from 1940, both the Symphony and Gaffigan were in taut control of a score that, like most of the composer's large-scale music, runs a continual risk of sprawl. The playing throughout was crisply and almost casually virtuosic, light on its feet without ever sounding thin or underpowered. Gaffigan let the orchestra linger in the juicy spots (like the sax-led second theme of the first movement), but the dominant impulse was forward, with an urgency that lent a ghostly whirl to the waltz of the second movement and bore the finale, “Dies irae” references and all, straight and purposefully through to its conclusion.