concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Sep. 10th, 2008 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacFirst regular concert of the fall season for me. I'm so out of practice, I almost forgot to go.
Had I been late, I would have missed Oliver Knussen's Third Symphony, a wad of dense modernist sludge of the sort that made me dislike modernist sludge in the first place. There is good late modernist music (Zwilich and Higdon, to name two), but this isn't it. Tries to say so many things at once that it just ends up as melted pontillism arguing with itself. Has no sense of its own emotional effect. If any. One thing I'll say for Knussen: he can orchestrate cleanly; judging from some of the recently-composed stuff I hear, that's no small achievement.
After that I was expecting a routine performance of Beethoven's Ninth, but MTT doesn't do routine. The first two movements were taken briskly, building their power not through weight or massiveness but through a strong sense of dynamics, building up from the lightest chirping of the violins into mighty thunderings at the world. The third movement, taken more slowly, was the massive one of this performance. MTT used the tempo and careful layering to build the later variations up into a climax mightier than anything that had preceded it.
And the Ode to Joy? Mostly at an even keel, pressing and forthright, with as little introspection as possible, though MTT interestingly came to a full stop at the end of the third verse, before the "Turkish" music and the tenor solo. Soloists solid, fairly strong-voiced but not outstandingly expressive. Chorus really good, very strong, carrying, and not at all screechy.
Not as monumental a journey as some performances, but full of passion and energy.
Had I been late, I would have missed Oliver Knussen's Third Symphony, a wad of dense modernist sludge of the sort that made me dislike modernist sludge in the first place. There is good late modernist music (Zwilich and Higdon, to name two), but this isn't it. Tries to say so many things at once that it just ends up as melted pontillism arguing with itself. Has no sense of its own emotional effect. If any. One thing I'll say for Knussen: he can orchestrate cleanly; judging from some of the recently-composed stuff I hear, that's no small achievement.
After that I was expecting a routine performance of Beethoven's Ninth, but MTT doesn't do routine. The first two movements were taken briskly, building their power not through weight or massiveness but through a strong sense of dynamics, building up from the lightest chirping of the violins into mighty thunderings at the world. The third movement, taken more slowly, was the massive one of this performance. MTT used the tempo and careful layering to build the later variations up into a climax mightier than anything that had preceded it.
And the Ode to Joy? Mostly at an even keel, pressing and forthright, with as little introspection as possible, though MTT interestingly came to a full stop at the end of the third verse, before the "Turkish" music and the tenor solo. Soloists solid, fairly strong-voiced but not outstandingly expressive. Chorus really good, very strong, carrying, and not at all screechy.
Not as monumental a journey as some performances, but full of passion and energy.
