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concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Oct. 14th, 2004 04:06 pmOn to the San Francisco Symphony, dominated by guest conductor Robert Spano (tall, bald, like William Steinberg) and pianist Emanuel Ax (shambling, bearlike), both very finely subdued in their music-making. They performed together Mozart's final piano concerto in that smooth, elegant, flowing style that clicks along and makes Mozart go very well. The final two movements of the concerto expose the piano a great deal - there's a lot of call-and-response there - but in the first movement Ax melded the piano so gently into the orchestra that it felt like it was hiding behind even pizzicato strings, more like a symphony with piano obbligato than a concerto. I liked it that way.
This was preceded by a 1989 orchestral work by Mark-Anthony Turnage titled "Three Screaming Popes." Not quite as ugly as the title made it sound (it's a reference to a series of Francis Bacon paintings), it was still ugly enough, in the disconnected contrapuntal style one gets used to hearing from composers like Thomas Ades. Occasional jazzy interpolations gave a glimpse of what jazz-influenced concert music could have become if George Gershwin hadn't died young, but this was buried beneath acres of interesting but sludgy scoring.
Juxtaposing something like this against Mozart should be enough to answer in itself why people think they hate modern music (and, incidentally, why the hall was half-empty, quite a change from last week's packed hall). If Mozart had been born in 1960, would he be writing like Turnage? I don't think so. He'd be living high off pop hits, shoving more ambitious work into a back drawer because he wouldn't be able to get it performed: it wouldn't be ugly enough. And if Turnage had been born in 1756, would he be writing like Mozart, or even like one of his lesser contemporaries? I doubt he'd have the chops, or would care to be a musician at all.
The second half was Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony, the third of his four works called symphony: I've now heard them all in concert. It's a vocal-choral orchestral song cycle of 14 poems about spring. They're clustered into four groups that roughly parallel the movements of a conventional symphony, but the work as a whole really doesn't work as one: each poem is distinctly different in style and in orchestration, which is highly varied and mostly very thin. Though this lets the vocalists stand out, Spano again opted for a highly blended style, which unfortunately kept a lot of the words from being clear, but as sound it worked very well. Britten's vocal lines are in a lyrical but unmelodic kunstlied style, shared out among three soloists (deep-voiced soprano Mary Dunleavy, smooth mezzo Susanne Mentzer, and clear, piping tenor John Mark Ainsley), an adult chorus, and a children's chorus which, otherwise neglected, could be counted on entering any time the text approached a line about "school-boys playing in the stream" [George Peele] or "Little girl / sweet and small" [William Blake]. I liked the weird orchestration that went with the opening poem, an anonymous 16th-century farewell to winter, and the ghostly strings of Henry Vaughan's ode to rain, both of which reminded me of Shostakovich.
This was preceded by a 1989 orchestral work by Mark-Anthony Turnage titled "Three Screaming Popes." Not quite as ugly as the title made it sound (it's a reference to a series of Francis Bacon paintings), it was still ugly enough, in the disconnected contrapuntal style one gets used to hearing from composers like Thomas Ades. Occasional jazzy interpolations gave a glimpse of what jazz-influenced concert music could have become if George Gershwin hadn't died young, but this was buried beneath acres of interesting but sludgy scoring.
Juxtaposing something like this against Mozart should be enough to answer in itself why people think they hate modern music (and, incidentally, why the hall was half-empty, quite a change from last week's packed hall). If Mozart had been born in 1960, would he be writing like Turnage? I don't think so. He'd be living high off pop hits, shoving more ambitious work into a back drawer because he wouldn't be able to get it performed: it wouldn't be ugly enough. And if Turnage had been born in 1756, would he be writing like Mozart, or even like one of his lesser contemporaries? I doubt he'd have the chops, or would care to be a musician at all.
The second half was Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony, the third of his four works called symphony: I've now heard them all in concert. It's a vocal-choral orchestral song cycle of 14 poems about spring. They're clustered into four groups that roughly parallel the movements of a conventional symphony, but the work as a whole really doesn't work as one: each poem is distinctly different in style and in orchestration, which is highly varied and mostly very thin. Though this lets the vocalists stand out, Spano again opted for a highly blended style, which unfortunately kept a lot of the words from being clear, but as sound it worked very well. Britten's vocal lines are in a lyrical but unmelodic kunstlied style, shared out among three soloists (deep-voiced soprano Mary Dunleavy, smooth mezzo Susanne Mentzer, and clear, piping tenor John Mark Ainsley), an adult chorus, and a children's chorus which, otherwise neglected, could be counted on entering any time the text approached a line about "school-boys playing in the stream" [George Peele] or "Little girl / sweet and small" [William Blake]. I liked the weird orchestration that went with the opening poem, an anonymous 16th-century farewell to winter, and the ghostly strings of Henry Vaughan's ode to rain, both of which reminded me of Shostakovich.
