concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted, and though that's most of what he does nowadays, I still think of him as a pianist, so it's weird to have him on the podium while some other guy - a lanky young man named Yevgeny Sudbin - plays the solo part in Beethoven's Fourth Concerto.

It was a fine performance, but I rather feel it was a mistake to sandwich such a jewel-like piece of lyricism between two hard, dark works of much later origin, even though one of those works was very good. It's the jumping around that clashes. A lot of concerts with disparate pieces put them in chronological order, to acclimate the ear, or sometimes in reverse chronological order, so that the older work comes as a refreshing wash, and the latter would have been practical here.

The good newer work was very new indeed: this was its premiere performance. Music in Dark Times by Steven R. Gerber is a suite of six very short movements toting up to about 15 minutes. Gerber is a superb practitioner of a smooth, layered orchestration, with each section of the orchestra striking off the others the way Tchaikovsky would do it. His harmonic language is tonal post-academic, in search of atmosphere rather than melody. I was reminded a little of Craig Russell's similarly fragmented "Middle-earth" suite.

But while Gerber's music is agreeable to listen to, this work is neither as original nor as imaginative as Russell's. One slow movement sounded like Vaughan Williams; the other like Henry Cowell mixed with Shostakovich. And the "Dead March" is an Nth-generation photocopy of Gustav Holst's Saturn.

On the opposite side, William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, something I had somehow avoided ever hearing before. I found this a fundamentally silly piece of music, and I don't mean that in a good way. Sloppy and superficial. (When the subject was first suggested to him, Walton reportedly couldn't recall which king was Belshazzar and which one was Nebuchadnezzar.) Chorus and solo bass declaim a lot, mostly a cappella, in that randomly chromatic modern-opera way, putting shouting emphasis on odd phrases. ("DRANK FROM THE SACRED VESSELS!")

When the orchestra does come in, you wish they hadn't, as they're just there to make primitivist noise. The most unintentionally hilarious part is where the chorus quotes the king saying, "Praise ye the God of Gold/Silver/Iron/Wood/etc.," and the orchestra jumps in after each trying to sound like the material in question.

The climax comes like this:
Bass: "In that night was Belshazzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the King, slain."
Chorus: "¡¡¡¡¡SLAIN!!!!!"
(If you want to experience this - in a less shrill performance than I heard last night, incidentally - pull up this YouTube video and fast-forward to 1:35.)
After which the orchestra breaks into a Happy Dance, rather like the Happy Dance after Billy the Kid is shot in Copland's ballet, except that Copland had the advantage that he was trying to make the contrast sound grotesquely ridiculous. Walton achieved it without trying.

Perhaps Walton eventually realized how silly a work he'd written, because thirty years later he appeared with great fanfare to conduct an "excerpt from Belshazzar's Feast" at the Hoffnung Memorial Concert. He faced the full orchestra and chorus, raised a flyswatter instead of a baton, and out came the single chord:
"¡¡¡¡¡SLAIN!!!!!"
Walton then turned around, bowed to applause, and left the podium.

Comments

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for this flyswatter image. It almost redeems the damn piece.

The Seattle Symphony did it a year or two ago. It was pretty excruciating. The part I liked best was the god of iron, when we could see that the percussionist was (yes! yes!) whacking an anvil with a big hammer. The other part I liked best was when the damn thing was over. It ranks second in Glenn's and my list of classical music pieces we have wished would end soon and yet have not walked out of, while recognizing that the piece itself and not the performance is the problem. Number one and still champion is Schumann's setting of Byron's poem, Manfred. We saw a steady stream of people heading for the exits throughout that monster. Years later, either of us can make the other snort by muttering mournfully, "Mahn-fred."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There may be something about Manfred. (All I know of the Schumann work is the overture, which is pretty good: otoh, it's the only part that gets played much.) My undoubted candidate for the worst-ever symphony by a composer capable of doing better, bar none, is Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Oooooh, you know, I am totally on the opposite side on this concert. I thought the Gerber trite; found Ashkenazy boring in the extreme conducting both the Gerber and Beethoven; thought the Walton - a silly piece - came out best exactly because it depends on effects and loudness to be effective, rather than, say, structure and harmonic movement, like the Beethoven. I'll have more to say on my music blog about why I dislike Ashkenazy; for now I'll limit it to saying that technically he's an extremely weak conductor, and what he does physically also suggests to me that he doesn't have much in the way of ideas to put over.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

We may not be so far apart. I praise Gerber as an orchestrator: I did not find his composition particularly original or imaginative.

And the performance of the Walton may well have been good - my criticism is much more of the work than the performance. The soloist was strong; I like a singer who can project. Certainly the music got a strong reaction from me, which it might not if the performance had been dull.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

I would have wanted to be in the audience for PC#4 (currently my favorite piano concerto) but not at the expense of having to last through the other two works.

I've mentioned this to you before: The more prestigeous the symphony orchestra, the more likely they are to include a work in a concert program that will leave you cold. (This is rwl's First Law of Symphony Orchestras.)