concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Wednesday's concert was, by SFS standards, an unremarkable, ordinary week's concert, and by that token a testimony to what it's like to have a conductor as experienced and talented as MTT as your regular music director. In his impressionistic, gestural way, he led his skilled musicians through music by Brahms (what I was there to hear) and Berg (not what I was there to hear) in a way emphasizing subtle colors that washed over the music in an almost visual, painterly way. There was fluctuating urgency, to be sure, but dramatic tirades were eschewed in favor of pastoral beauty. The result with Brahms was a Piano Concerto No. 1 that sounded more like the traditionally more lyrical Piano Concerto No. 2, with soloist Yefim Bronfman, a regular visitor here, in full cooperation with the orchestra, and an Academic Festival Overture - and how often do you get to hear that old chestnut in a symphony concert nowadays? - that sounded like a missing movement from the genial Second Symphony.

Berg's orchestration for strings of three movements from his Lyric Suite was sonorous enough for anyone, but I didn't find it as interesting as my encounters with the work in its original string quartet form. As usual with such cases, if the intent was to show that Berg goes well with Brahms, the result was to prove that it doesn't.

My only real complaint, though, is with Larry Rothe's program notes for the concerto. Rothe goes on and on about Johannes and Clara, even waffling over whether her greater age affected his feelings or not, preparing us for exactly the sort of anguished performance we didn't get - before admitting that we don't actually know if the two had a romance or not, and then even more crashingly admitting that we have absolutely no idea of how, if at all, this personal drama affected the music, which after all is what we're here for. Give it a rest, Larry, just give it a rest. Leering prurience doesn't look good on you.