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concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Feb. 22nd, 2007 06:44 amWell, this is a little embarrassing. Back in December when my editors at SFCV asked the staff for concert highlights of the next six months, of all the SFS offerings I picked this week's because of programming I found particularly delectable.
So what happens but the guest conductor calls in sick the day before, and the replacement - for, I'm sure, good and sufficient reasons involving what music he knows well enough to conduct with minimal prep time - jiggers with the program. It's still interesting, and it's close in spirit to the original, but it's lost the qualities that made it particularly stand out for me.
So instead of Dvorak's Sixth Symphony, my favorite of his lesser-known symphonies (by which I mean all but the last two), we get the Seventh: which not only do I not like as well, but I just heard from SSV a few weeks ago. This performance was more precise, more burnished in sound, but less strikingly individual and, in the end, less well-shaped than the SSV one. The slow movement tapped profundity but the finale just sort of skated along.
And instead of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1 (how often do you get to hear one of those at a formal symphony concert? I wondered; and the superceded program gave the answer: this one hasn't been played by this orchestra since 1931), we got another Dvorak, the Carnival Overture, too often heard and the closest thing he ever wrote to a true potboiler.
What did remain the same was William Schuman's Song of Orpheus, a short cello concerto that SFS principal cellist Michael Grebanier had been waiting 20 years to play with them again. Unusually for Schuman this is mostly a soft, contemplative work, full of cadenzas and other solo passages, whose rhapsodic quality would have fit well with its originally scheduled companions.
Overheard on the way out: "That was pretty good. I even liked the modern work. It wasn't too modern; it was written in 1906 or something like that." Actually 1961, but I wouldn't want to spoil your idea that modernism goes in some kind of linear progression.
So what happens but the guest conductor calls in sick the day before, and the replacement - for, I'm sure, good and sufficient reasons involving what music he knows well enough to conduct with minimal prep time - jiggers with the program. It's still interesting, and it's close in spirit to the original, but it's lost the qualities that made it particularly stand out for me.
So instead of Dvorak's Sixth Symphony, my favorite of his lesser-known symphonies (by which I mean all but the last two), we get the Seventh: which not only do I not like as well, but I just heard from SSV a few weeks ago. This performance was more precise, more burnished in sound, but less strikingly individual and, in the end, less well-shaped than the SSV one. The slow movement tapped profundity but the finale just sort of skated along.
And instead of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1 (how often do you get to hear one of those at a formal symphony concert? I wondered; and the superceded program gave the answer: this one hasn't been played by this orchestra since 1931), we got another Dvorak, the Carnival Overture, too often heard and the closest thing he ever wrote to a true potboiler.
What did remain the same was William Schuman's Song of Orpheus, a short cello concerto that SFS principal cellist Michael Grebanier had been waiting 20 years to play with them again. Unusually for Schuman this is mostly a soft, contemplative work, full of cadenzas and other solo passages, whose rhapsodic quality would have fit well with its originally scheduled companions.
Overheard on the way out: "That was pretty good. I even liked the modern work. It wasn't too modern; it was written in 1906 or something like that." Actually 1961, but I wouldn't want to spoil your idea that modernism goes in some kind of linear progression.
