concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Oct. 29th, 2008 11:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI always look forward to music director laureate Herbert Blomstedt's returns to the San Francisco Symphony, because he leads the kind of works I most like to hear. This week it was Bruckner's Second, a symphony I'd never heard live before.
But first, we had to get through a piano concerto by Witold Lutoslawski. I was expecting this to be penance, but it was better than I'd have thought: provocatively crunchy, and interestingly constructed. Still, music in the Martinu/Bartok territory is nothing like Bruckner.
The box I sit in was nearly empty - Lutoslawski and Bruckner don't exactly bring in the crowds - but about six seats away and a couple rows down were two very young men, one of whom kept making occasional remarks to the other, in a voice not as sotto voce as he probably imagined. This was bothersome enough during the concerto, and I really didn't want it to disfigure my Bruckner. But I also didn't want to pre-emptively confront him during intermission: he wasn't talking that incessantly, and maybe he'd just been more bored by the concerto than I was.
But just in case, I found a blank page in the program book and wrote "PLEASE DON'T TALK DURING THE MUSIC" on it in block letters. Sure enough, he started talking early in the symphony. So I opened the program book to that page, walked over and handed it to him, and returned to my seat. No more distractions from that quarter.
Meanwhile, somewhere down below us, Maestro Blomstedt was navigating his way through Bruckner's massive tidal ebbs and flows with some success, interspersed with characteristic slack passages. This performance used the new Carragan edition of the score. I've heard some of Carragan's reconstructed Bruckner before, and wasn't too impressed by the depth of his grasp of Bruckner's idiom. (I learned my Bruckner study from Deryck Cooke and Robert Simpson, and am consequently a partisan of the first critical editor, Robert Haas, who's in disrepute these days for understanding Bruckner a little too well.) But there wasn't too much Carragan could do to the Second, though he did introduce some piquant changes to the orchestration, and reversed the order of the middle movements. Amusingly, while the notes writer knew this, whoever wrote up the evening's menu for the main program page did not. I was anticipating the question of which order would prevail, when the manager walked out before the piece began and spoiled the fun with an announcement.
But first, we had to get through a piano concerto by Witold Lutoslawski. I was expecting this to be penance, but it was better than I'd have thought: provocatively crunchy, and interestingly constructed. Still, music in the Martinu/Bartok territory is nothing like Bruckner.
The box I sit in was nearly empty - Lutoslawski and Bruckner don't exactly bring in the crowds - but about six seats away and a couple rows down were two very young men, one of whom kept making occasional remarks to the other, in a voice not as sotto voce as he probably imagined. This was bothersome enough during the concerto, and I really didn't want it to disfigure my Bruckner. But I also didn't want to pre-emptively confront him during intermission: he wasn't talking that incessantly, and maybe he'd just been more bored by the concerto than I was.
But just in case, I found a blank page in the program book and wrote "PLEASE DON'T TALK DURING THE MUSIC" on it in block letters. Sure enough, he started talking early in the symphony. So I opened the program book to that page, walked over and handed it to him, and returned to my seat. No more distractions from that quarter.
Meanwhile, somewhere down below us, Maestro Blomstedt was navigating his way through Bruckner's massive tidal ebbs and flows with some success, interspersed with characteristic slack passages. This performance used the new Carragan edition of the score. I've heard some of Carragan's reconstructed Bruckner before, and wasn't too impressed by the depth of his grasp of Bruckner's idiom. (I learned my Bruckner study from Deryck Cooke and Robert Simpson, and am consequently a partisan of the first critical editor, Robert Haas, who's in disrepute these days for understanding Bruckner a little too well.) But there wasn't too much Carragan could do to the Second, though he did introduce some piquant changes to the orchestration, and reversed the order of the middle movements. Amusingly, while the notes writer knew this, whoever wrote up the evening's menu for the main program page did not. I was anticipating the question of which order would prevail, when the manager walked out before the piece began and spoiled the fun with an announcement.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-31 02:53 pm (UTC)I know the Lutoslawski concerto, and remember it as one of his more "moderate" pieces. But what was the Martinu? He's another one I like.
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Date: 2008-11-02 09:48 pm (UTC)