A Wonderfully Troubling Ninth

Michelle Dulak Thomson on September 16, 2008
If you had been in the audience for Saturday's Michael Tilson Thomas–led San Francisco Symphony concert, and had opened the printed program at random, more likely than not you would have hit the page of bios for the soloists in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which are just at the midpoint of the booklet. You might, on the other hand, have landed a few pages further on, with your eye lighting on the bolded phrase "abnormal thoughts and behavior." Part of the Ninth's program note? No, silly; that's the four-page bound-in pharmaceutical circular for Ambien© and AmbienCR©. The Ninth is surely on anyone's short list of pieces that ought to bear warning labels. The amount of insomnia it caused Beethoven's successors in the 19th century alone might have supported a sizable pharmacy. I doubt that anyone at the Symphony was trying to suggest that only Ambien could ward off the troubled dreams sure to follow the performance. But for an instant I thought that here was a classical-music marketing device to top my previous favorite: a "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" "sticker" printed on the cover of an early-'90s edition of Henry Purcell's complete catches. (With perfect justification, I might add.) This wasn't a Ninth specially calculated to set the audience to brooding long into the night. Because the audience for this one-piece, no-intermission program (Oliver Knussen's Third Symphony, opening the three preceding performances of the set, was skipped Saturday) was on the whole younger and, dare I say, greener than usual for the Symphony, that was just as well. Yet any good performance of the piece can't help but provoke thought; and certainly Tilson Thomas gave listeners of every level of experience something to ponder over. It was a performance that drew attention to extremes, highlighting everything craggy, loud, outré, and unexpected in the score. It contrived to do this, for the most part, while avoiding much actual risk, and there was no place in which the orchestra sounded even slightly overtaxed. The dynamic range was large, bolstered in places by extra personnel (like the second timpanist who appeared just for the recapitulation of the first movement, the player resurfacing at the bass drum in the finale).

Dramatic Moments Called Out

The dramatic moments, also, were writ large, beginning with the first movement's initial fortissimo, 17 bars in: a drastic, gargantuan slowing-up, followed by an "a tempo" rather slower than the starting speed. (The starting tempo came back when the starting music did, a dozen or so bars later, to be dumped again in the same way.) Later obvious "big moments" got similar treatment. The fanfares toward the end of the slow movement have been handled like this for so long by so many conductors that I think I would have thought that handling "part of the piece" if I hadn't played the Ninth a few years ago under a conductor who poked fun at it. Now, I find, I can take that traditional gesture or leave it. On Saturday it undeniably made a certain effect, all the more so in that MTT encouraged the second violins, after the fanfare, to bring out their echoes of it. But there were other episodes of maestroly point-making that I found merely irritating. Those extraordinary pivot-points into new keys between the two themes of the slow movement, above all — is it really necessary to slow to a standstill before turning that enchanted corner? Can't the astonishing change of vista be accompanied by nothing but a tiny falter in the step, a minute catch of the breath? Well, of course it can. But this wasn't that sort of Ninth. It was one that had steeped awhile in later music — later music that the work did, after all, engender. There was (not inaptly) more than a bit of Mahler in its gestures. Those key changes in the slow movement, I almost felt, came for MTT with an invisible "zurückhaltend" (pulling back) attached, marked right before the double bar as Mahler would have. At the same time, details were pulled out of the texture that I've never noticed before in this way, neither when listening to the work nor when playing it. Midway through the development in the first movement, for example, the second violins suddenly launch into the repeated sextuplets that start the whole piece. I suppose I knew at some level that that layer of the texture was there, but Saturday (with the section wailing on it as if possessed, Dan Nobuhiko Smiley at their head) it hit me like a physical slap. Neither have I noticed the flutes doubling the violas in the finale's "Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?" (How do you bow down, you millions?) quite like that. To say that the orchestra outdid itself would be to imply that they don't always sound like this. Let's just say that the timbral pleasures that Symphony listeners would expect were all there, and not a whit less impressive simply because we've grown accustomed to them. Catherine Payne's amazingly clear and beautifully tuned piccolo, Stephen Paulson's mellow bassoon (does anyone play the exquisite countermelody to the "Ode to Joy" more sweetly?), and Carey Bell's finely shaded clarinet deserve singling out. As does the magnificent fourth horn soloist [Jessica Valeri] in the slow movement — I've grown so used to careful and quiet renditions of that G-flat-major scale that her expansive, full-toned version was almost a shock.

Well-Balanced Soloists

The soloists came onstage before the slow movement, presumably so that the finale could follow the slow movement attacca. But there had been applause after the first and second movements, and MTT didn't try to forestall it after the third, either. The solo quartet — soprano Erin Wall, mezzo Kendall Gladen, tenor Garrett Sorenson, and bass Alastair Miles — were a remarkably balanced foursome (it was a particular pleasure to be able to hear Gladen clearly among the other three). Miles was an impassioned if slightly lightweight protagonist in the recitative, Sorenson a giddy, gleeful leader of the Turkish band, Wall magnificent in her high-lying part (at last, a soprano who doesn't scoop up to the high B). And Ragnar Bohlin's Symphony Chorus was impeccably drilled, solid in both timbre and tuning. I did wonder more than once if I would have been able to guess the words if I didn't know them already, but I don't know how much clearer any choir could be in such numbers and at such distance.