concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The renowned Mstislav Rostropovich has come to town to lead a two-week Shostakovich festival in honor of the composer's birth centennial later this year. (Rostropovich himself turns 79 between this and next week's concerts, but he's still hale.) Yefim Bronfman, master of this repertoire, pounded away at the First Piano Concerto, alias the Concerto for Piano and Trumpet, with sterling support from the symphony's semi-retired principal trumpet, Glenn Fischthal.

The big work was the Fifth Symphony. It was a typical Rostropovich performance, draggy tempos in the slow sections and erratic emphases in the fast, more emphasis on emotion than ensemble, but fun to listen to if you weren't expected to take a recording of it home. As always, the finale was stirring, and I keep thinking of the description of it as "forced rejoicing, created under threat" in Volkov's Testimony. Even though the book, as a record of Shostakovich's thoughts, is a hoax, the description clicks as an explanation of the somewhat hollow, shrill side of the movement. (Not that composers haven't had trouble with major-key finales to minor-key symphonies for centuries. There are people, and I'm one of them, who prefer to just omit the "Ode to Joy" when listening to recordings of Beethoven's Ninth.) Yet it brings audiences to their feet. But isn't there, as I think Alex Ross has suggested, something sinister in some of the underlying harmonies?

Maybe, but then what about the Festive Overture that opened the program? This was the public Shostakovich, written to celebrate the 37th anniversary (such a big round number) of the October Revolution. Not something we'd care to celebrate today, but we still play the piece. It's described as "buoyant," and the light bouncy themes that dominate the work are unlike anything in the Fifth Symphony. If Shostakovich was faking rejoicing, he was much more convincing about it here.

But then listen to the trombones in the Overture's introduction. Isn't that a kind of sinister underlying harmony too?

two hundred years ago today

Early afternoon on March 23, 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition abandoned Fort Clatsop, the Pacific Coast winter quarters where they'd spent nearly four months, to head home. It would take them six months to get back to Saint Louis, which they'd left a year and a half before reaching the Pacific. The greater time required to head west was mostly due to the time spent lugging boats upstream on the Missouri, but also to inexperience in the mountains.

The year 1804, which only took them as far as North Dakota, was the shakedown cruise. The men learned to work together, and a few who weren't up to the rigors ahead washed out. The second year, 1805, was the year of exploration. Now they were in lands no whites had visited before, and it took all their grit and ingenuity to find a way to the Pacific.

Those two years are the ones most Lewis and Clark fanciers concentrate on. But my favorite part of their story is 1806, the year of mastery. This is the year when they knew where they were and what they were doing. They explored byways, alternate routes, and side areas. They split up to do more things. They gave all three of their wilderness-tested sergeants independent commands. At one point in July, the Lewis and Clark expedition consisted of five separate parties wandering around different parts of what is now Montana. And they all got back together again as planned, with very little hitch.

More updates later on.