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concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Mar. 26th, 2009 07:11 amVladimir Ashkenazy conducted, and though that's most of what he does nowadays, I still think of him as a pianist, so it's weird to have him on the podium while some other guy - a lanky young man named Yevgeny Sudbin - plays the solo part in Beethoven's Fourth Concerto.
It was a fine performance, but I rather feel it was a mistake to sandwich such a jewel-like piece of lyricism between two hard, dark works of much later origin, even though one of those works was very good. It's the jumping around that clashes. A lot of concerts with disparate pieces put them in chronological order, to acclimate the ear, or sometimes in reverse chronological order, so that the older work comes as a refreshing wash, and the latter would have been practical here.
The good newer work was very new indeed: this was its premiere performance. Music in Dark Times by Steven R. Gerber is a suite of six very short movements toting up to about 15 minutes. Gerber is a superb practitioner of a smooth, layered orchestration, with each section of the orchestra striking off the others the way Tchaikovsky would do it. His harmonic language is tonal post-academic, in search of atmosphere rather than melody. I was reminded a little of Craig Russell's similarly fragmented "Middle-earth" suite.
But while Gerber's music is agreeable to listen to, this work is neither as original nor as imaginative as Russell's. One slow movement sounded like Vaughan Williams; the other like Henry Cowell mixed with Shostakovich. And the "Dead March" is an Nth-generation photocopy of Gustav Holst's Saturn.
On the opposite side, William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, something I had somehow avoided ever hearing before. I found this a fundamentally silly piece of music, and I don't mean that in a good way. Sloppy and superficial. (When the subject was first suggested to him, Walton reportedly couldn't recall which king was Belshazzar and which one was Nebuchadnezzar.) Chorus and solo bass declaim a lot, mostly a cappella, in that randomly chromatic modern-opera way, putting shouting emphasis on odd phrases. ("DRANK FROM THE SACRED VESSELS!")
When the orchestra does come in, you wish they hadn't, as they're just there to make primitivist noise. The most unintentionally hilarious part is where the chorus quotes the king saying, "Praise ye the God of Gold/Silver/Iron/Wood/etc.," and the orchestra jumps in after each trying to sound like the material in question.
The climax comes like this:
Bass: "In that night was Belshazzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the King, slain."
Chorus: "¡¡¡¡¡SLAIN!!!!!"
(If you want to experience this - in a less shrill performance than I heard last night, incidentally - pull up this YouTube video and fast-forward to 1:35.)
After which the orchestra breaks into a Happy Dance, rather like the Happy Dance after Billy the Kid is shot in Copland's ballet, except that Copland had the advantage that he was trying to make the contrast sound grotesquely ridiculous. Walton achieved it without trying.
Perhaps Walton eventually realized how silly a work he'd written, because thirty years later he appeared with great fanfare to conduct an "excerpt from Belshazzar's Feast" at the Hoffnung Memorial Concert. He faced the full orchestra and chorus, raised a flyswatter instead of a baton, and out came the single chord:
"¡¡¡¡¡SLAIN!!!!!"
Walton then turned around, bowed to applause, and left the podium.
It was a fine performance, but I rather feel it was a mistake to sandwich such a jewel-like piece of lyricism between two hard, dark works of much later origin, even though one of those works was very good. It's the jumping around that clashes. A lot of concerts with disparate pieces put them in chronological order, to acclimate the ear, or sometimes in reverse chronological order, so that the older work comes as a refreshing wash, and the latter would have been practical here.
The good newer work was very new indeed: this was its premiere performance. Music in Dark Times by Steven R. Gerber is a suite of six very short movements toting up to about 15 minutes. Gerber is a superb practitioner of a smooth, layered orchestration, with each section of the orchestra striking off the others the way Tchaikovsky would do it. His harmonic language is tonal post-academic, in search of atmosphere rather than melody. I was reminded a little of Craig Russell's similarly fragmented "Middle-earth" suite.
But while Gerber's music is agreeable to listen to, this work is neither as original nor as imaginative as Russell's. One slow movement sounded like Vaughan Williams; the other like Henry Cowell mixed with Shostakovich. And the "Dead March" is an Nth-generation photocopy of Gustav Holst's Saturn.
On the opposite side, William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, something I had somehow avoided ever hearing before. I found this a fundamentally silly piece of music, and I don't mean that in a good way. Sloppy and superficial. (When the subject was first suggested to him, Walton reportedly couldn't recall which king was Belshazzar and which one was Nebuchadnezzar.) Chorus and solo bass declaim a lot, mostly a cappella, in that randomly chromatic modern-opera way, putting shouting emphasis on odd phrases. ("DRANK FROM THE SACRED VESSELS!")
When the orchestra does come in, you wish they hadn't, as they're just there to make primitivist noise. The most unintentionally hilarious part is where the chorus quotes the king saying, "Praise ye the God of Gold/Silver/Iron/Wood/etc.," and the orchestra jumps in after each trying to sound like the material in question.
The climax comes like this:
Bass: "In that night was Belshazzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the King, slain."
Chorus: "¡¡¡¡¡SLAIN!!!!!"
(If you want to experience this - in a less shrill performance than I heard last night, incidentally - pull up this YouTube video and fast-forward to 1:35.)
After which the orchestra breaks into a Happy Dance, rather like the Happy Dance after Billy the Kid is shot in Copland's ballet, except that Copland had the advantage that he was trying to make the contrast sound grotesquely ridiculous. Walton achieved it without trying.
Perhaps Walton eventually realized how silly a work he'd written, because thirty years later he appeared with great fanfare to conduct an "excerpt from Belshazzar's Feast" at the Hoffnung Memorial Concert. He faced the full orchestra and chorus, raised a flyswatter instead of a baton, and out came the single chord:
"¡¡¡¡¡SLAIN!!!!!"
Walton then turned around, bowed to applause, and left the podium.
