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concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Dalia Stasevska has led some dazzling performances here in the past. So I was looking forward to hearing what she could do with Sibelius's dramatically extroverted Fifth Symphony.
So here she was, dressed as usual in yet another oddly-colored long coat, and her Sibelius Fifth was not dazzling, exactly, but Heroically Grand. Through most of the work, Sibelius builds up to brief but intense climaxes, and Stasevska emphasized their Grandeur. Then at the end, when Sibelius marshals up all his resources for a final blast, the Heroic Grandeur just topped them all. Stasevska was especially skilled at flowing it naturally into the coda, whose long pauses sometimes fool audiences into applause who can't tell the difference between a dominant chord and a tonic when they hear it. But that didn't happen this time. The conductor was in command.
A similar approach was taken to Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, a work you rarely hear live. The general approach was slow and worshipful, as it should be, but Stasevska built the climaxes up into some of the same sense of Grandeur that she did Sibelius.
Also on the program, and taking up a good holy chunk of it, was a new cello concerto by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inexplicably titled Before we fall and featuring Johannes Moser as soloist. Anna (that chunk of letters, properly Þorvaldsdóttir, is not her surname, but her patronymic: you call Icelanders by their first names) is a soundscape composer who specializes in weird sonorities, and we had that here. Strange dissonant shimmerings from the orchestra began this work. There's a long cadenza filled with col legno, ponticello, and other rattling sounds. But gradually the music melted down, via some weird sinking glissandi, into deep dark low sounds from soloist and orchestra alike, punctuated by clangs and thumps from the percussion. And this might have been interesting had it been half as long.
So here she was, dressed as usual in yet another oddly-colored long coat, and her Sibelius Fifth was not dazzling, exactly, but Heroically Grand. Through most of the work, Sibelius builds up to brief but intense climaxes, and Stasevska emphasized their Grandeur. Then at the end, when Sibelius marshals up all his resources for a final blast, the Heroic Grandeur just topped them all. Stasevska was especially skilled at flowing it naturally into the coda, whose long pauses sometimes fool audiences into applause who can't tell the difference between a dominant chord and a tonic when they hear it. But that didn't happen this time. The conductor was in command.
A similar approach was taken to Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia, a work you rarely hear live. The general approach was slow and worshipful, as it should be, but Stasevska built the climaxes up into some of the same sense of Grandeur that she did Sibelius.
Also on the program, and taking up a good holy chunk of it, was a new cello concerto by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, inexplicably titled Before we fall and featuring Johannes Moser as soloist. Anna (that chunk of letters, properly Þorvaldsdóttir, is not her surname, but her patronymic: you call Icelanders by their first names) is a soundscape composer who specializes in weird sonorities, and we had that here. Strange dissonant shimmerings from the orchestra began this work. There's a long cadenza filled with col legno, ponticello, and other rattling sounds. But gradually the music melted down, via some weird sinking glissandi, into deep dark low sounds from soloist and orchestra alike, punctuated by clangs and thumps from the percussion. And this might have been interesting had it been half as long.
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I'm going to pay better attention to the local classical music calendar this year. I plan to go to all the Schola Cantorum Summer Sings this year, for instance, and remember that I'm also a singer.
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