concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Jun. 3rd, 2023 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacGuest conductor for last night's concert was Manfred Honeck, music director in Pittsburgh, a healthy-looking grey-haired guy.
He brought with him a brief recent piece that Pittsburgh had commissioned, by Gloria Isabel Ramos Triano, originally from Venezuela and now a conductor working mainly in Europe. amazon (pretentiously eschewing a capital letter) - referring to the warrior women, not the river or the shipping company - is a bustling, active work resembling movie music in the Danny Elfman mode, with sudden quiet passages and a lot of percussion (7 players) clopping around in the background.
The rest of the concert delivered brilliantly colorful, rather than interpretatively compelling, versions of two of my favorite large-scale works.
In Rachmaninoff's Paganini Rhapsody, both pianist Beatrice Rana and the orchestra were magnificently crisp, like a single perfect potato chip that somehow takes half an hour to eat.
Schubert's Great C Major Symphony, of which I would not put "crispness" among its many virtues, was blisteringly fast, with a terrifyingly intense coda.
This was not MTT's or EPS's, let alone Blomstedt's, SFS, but it was good enough.
---
Next week's concert will be less familiar and more challenging: a concert version of the opera Adriana Mater by Kaija Saariaho. Who just died yesterday, I learned to my shock this morning. She was 70. Peace to her memory, and as this concert will be the first to demonstrate, her music will live on.
He brought with him a brief recent piece that Pittsburgh had commissioned, by Gloria Isabel Ramos Triano, originally from Venezuela and now a conductor working mainly in Europe. amazon (pretentiously eschewing a capital letter) - referring to the warrior women, not the river or the shipping company - is a bustling, active work resembling movie music in the Danny Elfman mode, with sudden quiet passages and a lot of percussion (7 players) clopping around in the background.
The rest of the concert delivered brilliantly colorful, rather than interpretatively compelling, versions of two of my favorite large-scale works.
In Rachmaninoff's Paganini Rhapsody, both pianist Beatrice Rana and the orchestra were magnificently crisp, like a single perfect potato chip that somehow takes half an hour to eat.
Schubert's Great C Major Symphony, of which I would not put "crispness" among its many virtues, was blisteringly fast, with a terrifyingly intense coda.
This was not MTT's or EPS's, let alone Blomstedt's, SFS, but it was good enough.
---
Next week's concert will be less familiar and more challenging: a concert version of the opera Adriana Mater by Kaija Saariaho. Who just died yesterday, I learned to my shock this morning. She was 70. Peace to her memory, and as this concert will be the first to demonstrate, her music will live on.
