concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

Ralph Vaughan Williams doesn't get much respect - Alex Ross actually singles him out as a composer he's not going to discuss in his epic book on modern music, and iirc Richard Taruskin does the same thing - and he doesn't get played much in this country either. Possibly VW is just too stable and sane a composer to be good fodder for cultural analysis. If a work of his does get heard, it's The Lark Ascending, a tiny quiet poem for solo violin occasionally accompanied by small orchestra. Here the velvety-smooth soloist was Nadya Tichman, the associate concertmaster with the big frizzy hair.

Just to prove that VW was not only the ruminative pastoralist that he's pegged as by pieces like this, guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier followed it up with the Symphony No. 4 (1934). Twenty years separate it from The Lark Ascending, years including one searing world war and the prospect of another, and that really left its mark on the music. Like everyone else with an interest in the subject, I've always considered the Fourth to be a harsh, even brutal symphony. But Tortelier proved me wrong! In his hands, it's jaunty: this is, after all, a symphony whose finale begins with a brass oompah. More than in other performances I've heard, the first and third movements retained the distinctive VW salt air sound that he'd employed so effectively in A Sea Symphony decades earlier; and the Andante was arrestingly Shostakovichian.

The other half of the concert, like the conductor, was French. Excerpts from Bizet's L'Arlesienne, a pops favorite rarely heard on more formal programs. Bizet had a knack for writing brass backup accompaniment that drowns out the strings trying to play the theme. Then, Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Timpani. The timpani gets singled out in the title because it's neither organ nor strings, but it doesn't get singled out much in the music, though a couple of times it gets to prove that it can still be heard over the organ at full throttle, which the strings can't. Balance problems again.

The problem with having an organist at your symphony concert, as I'd already sadly learned at SSV earlier this year, is that he takes even the most perfunctory applause as a cue to perform a long, tedious, and over-wrought encore. Sigh. Both there and in the concerto, this concert's organist, Paul Jacobs, favors a thin, reedy sound, like a swarm of bees angrily buzzing away in post-Stravinskian harmonies. At least it's not as bad as the deep warble preferred by most players from the theatre organ tradition.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

It's ironic, given the way that Ross rightly condemns Virgil Thomson for his attacks on Sibelius, and Adorno for his hostility to almost everyone not from Vienna, that he has this attitude to RVW. To whom his objection appears to be that he is not Britten.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Oh, he says he "reveres" VW (along with Nielsen and Revueltas, an interesting pair), he's just not going to talk about them. I think it's because they're all too sane to be easily discussable in a social history. Mahler's music may be crap, but you can talk about him endlessly.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

Now, of course, as you know, I seriously disagree with you about Mahler and the Second Viennese School, but yes, the thing about RVW is that he is one of the sanest of C20 composers, and probably one of the two or three nicest as well. Ross does like to be able to point out people's feet of clay it seems to me, good as he is in other respects.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Well, no. That's not why. He is explicit about picking Sibelius to represent a particular group of composers.

It would be easy to talk about RVW in a social history - the lead-in would be the revival of an English compositional transition, starting with Elgar, after a couple of centuries of somnolence.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, actually, because this is his explanation:

"Essentially, I found that certain composers' stories worked better than others in advancing the principal theme, which is music's relationship with surrounding historical events."

In other words, they don't fit the kind of cultural analysis he wants to make.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I see a distinction between "they don't fit the kind of cultural analysis he wants to make" and "too sane," but whatever.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, he wants to write cultural analysis about people who are more, shall we say, interesting in certain respects. Sibelius had his neuroses and his alcoholism. On the other hand, VW had this.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow.

Striking resemblance between Adeline and her cousin Virginia, eh??

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's way up there with me, too, but I love most of VW's work. You might find this a rewarding discussion.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I saw the program last night, and someone must have walloped Jacobs because he wasn't allowed near the keyboard after the concerto finished. I read on the Civic Center blog that his encore had been by Messiaen, one of his specialties. I'm sorry I didn't hear it because I love Messiaen and have never heard any of his organ music live.

That was one great performance of the RVW Fourth, about what I'd thought possible when I heard a much less incisive performance by the American Symphony Orch. in 2006, with the competent but not better than that Leon Botstein conducting. It's closer to Nielsen in mood than what you usually hear of RVW. I do not understand at all why American orchestras don't give his symphonies more attention than the shorter pieces.