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Concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Sep. 23rd, 2004 07:22 amTime for another concert season, and time to break out the TV cameras again. If you watch anything from MTT's new PBS series Keeping Score, remember that every time in the concert scenes that the camera dramatically swoops down into his face from the back of the orchestra, what the live audience got to see was a huge distracting crane cantering out over the stage. Ugh.
So shut your eyes and listen to the music. We began with just the last ten minutes of Stravinsky's Firebird, starting with the infernal dance whose sudden opening chord always wakes up anyone who was sleeping through the middle. Possibly MTT's decision to play just from this point onwards was inspired by the occasion a few years ago when a performance of the complete suite was interrupted by, appropriately enough, a fire alarm.
Fine performance, but without the weight of the rest of the suite behind it, the magnificent closing lacked some of its usual impact.
Then Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony. I've never been very fond of the outer movements of this, where it seems to me that Tchaikovsky's habit of developing by repeating himself was further hampered by poor thematic material, and by a lack of control of tension born of inexperience. (The inner movements, on the other hand, are charmers: a light march - resembling Saint-Saens's French Military March, this is one of Tchaikovsky's little-known gems - and a scherzo that sounds like Tchaikovsky's reorchestration of something by Beethoven.) However, MTT made the best possible case for this music: I liked in particular the way the finale's mock-pompous opening was deflated by humor rather than by anti-climax. Just another casually superb performance as one expects from the SFS.
At intermission, however, I did something I almost never do. As I was not feeling very well, and as I'd had a surfeit of heavy Russian music and swooping cameras in the first half, and above all because I've heard the noisy Le Sacre du Printemps far too often, I skipped out on it and went home. I'm sure it was a great performance, but I'd had enough.
On the way home I turned on the radio, and found myself plunged into the middle of Schubert's Unfinished. Much better. Came home in time to see my wife before she went to bed: that doesn't happen too often on evenings when I'm out.
So shut your eyes and listen to the music. We began with just the last ten minutes of Stravinsky's Firebird, starting with the infernal dance whose sudden opening chord always wakes up anyone who was sleeping through the middle. Possibly MTT's decision to play just from this point onwards was inspired by the occasion a few years ago when a performance of the complete suite was interrupted by, appropriately enough, a fire alarm.
Fine performance, but without the weight of the rest of the suite behind it, the magnificent closing lacked some of its usual impact.
Then Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony. I've never been very fond of the outer movements of this, where it seems to me that Tchaikovsky's habit of developing by repeating himself was further hampered by poor thematic material, and by a lack of control of tension born of inexperience. (The inner movements, on the other hand, are charmers: a light march - resembling Saint-Saens's French Military March, this is one of Tchaikovsky's little-known gems - and a scherzo that sounds like Tchaikovsky's reorchestration of something by Beethoven.) However, MTT made the best possible case for this music: I liked in particular the way the finale's mock-pompous opening was deflated by humor rather than by anti-climax. Just another casually superb performance as one expects from the SFS.
At intermission, however, I did something I almost never do. As I was not feeling very well, and as I'd had a surfeit of heavy Russian music and swooping cameras in the first half, and above all because I've heard the noisy Le Sacre du Printemps far too often, I skipped out on it and went home. I'm sure it was a great performance, but I'd had enough.
On the way home I turned on the radio, and found myself plunged into the middle of Schubert's Unfinished. Much better. Came home in time to see my wife before she went to bed: that doesn't happen too often on evenings when I'm out.
