concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

Has Marin Alsop ever conducted SFS before? If so I can't recall it. She's one of the great conductors of our time and SFS is still one of the great orchestras, so the two major works on this program were both pretty sizzling.

Gabriela Montero played her own Piano Concerto No. 1, which is subtitled "Latin" as in Latin America - she's a Venezuelan expatriate - but this was just a hint of flavoring, nothing of the "tourist music" air to it. The piano part is very active and continuous without being florid; the sound was attractive but not goopy; and the work had real heft, enough to make it fascinating to listen to all the way through. At times, Montero's playing reminded me of Rachmaninoff, at other times of Bach, without actually sounding in the least like either of them.

Then Alsop led a dramatic and atmospheric performance of Samuel Barber's dense and compact Symphony No. 1. Really brought this work to vividness - same condition as the Montero - and emphasized the extent to which its one movement contains seeds of the standard four. In this performance it sounded more like an ancestor to the Korngold Symphony than anything else.

Also on the program, Antropolis by Gabriela Ortiz, and this was tourist music. Had the same jumpy nature and constant percussion battery of other Mexican dancehall-inspired pieces like El Salon Mexico and Danzon No. 2 and Huapango without being anywhere near as attractive or tuneful as any of them.

Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, just because, I suppose, followed immediately by Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is nowhere near as memorable and was probably there just for its cheeky title.

Comments

[vgqn]

I was there too. Bernie told me on FB that you were there, but I didn’t spot you. I had a great seat where I could watch Montero playing, amazing.

I loved the whole concert, including the Ortiz piece with its marvelous timpani solo, as well as Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman which I found to be In playful and substantial musical dialogue with Copland’s, not just the title.

I wonder if other pianists are performing Montero‘s Concerto? It deserves to become a concert standard.

What did you think of her improvisation?

[calimac]

I sit over on the other side of the auditorium. (Near the upper floor men's restrooms, actually.)

It wasn't quite clear to me what tune Montero was improvising on, but her playing was much the same as in the concerto. It's quite an amazing style; nobody else plays like that any more, and improvisation of this fluency (I've heard some pretty bad unfluent attempts at improvisation) hasn't been heard since the 19th c, and since we don't have any recordings of it we have no idea what it sounded like. Maybe like this.

Have you heard any of the other, mostly excellent, new piano concertos SFS has played in the last few years?

Re the timpani, I didn't get into orchestral music to hear long unaccompanied solos by anybody, no matter how weird the instrument and especially no matter how virtuosic. (Q: Don't you like cadenzas? A: No.)

Substantively, Tower's piece seems to me to be in categorical denial of everything Copland is saying or stands for.

[wild_patience]

If it makes you feel better, musicians hate cadenzas, too, at least if they're not the soloist. Cadenzas can be changed at the soloist's whim or omitted. It's very frustrating when you're trying to figure out how long you need to rest and how near you are to your own entrance. And sometimes they lose the conductor, which is really bad.