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concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Mar. 11th, 2011 06:33 amFelix Mendelssohn gets no respect, says the feature article in this month's SFS program book, attributing this to his failure to lead a life of sufficient Romantic suffering. Though he did die of a predictable stroke at the ridiculous age of 38; come on, what do you want?
Yesterday we had an all-Mendelssohn program to make up for this. Kurt Masur, formerly Felix's distant successor as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, inched out on stage, older and frailer than when I'd last seen him, looking in fact much like an emaciated version of the late Richard Gruen. This did not prevent him, with his usual minimal gestures, from leading totally winning, boundingly vital, cheerfully brisk, harmonically rich, and utterly confident performances of the Italian Symphony and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The problem with playing the complete Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music, and not just the suite of the overture and 3 or 4 intermezzi more often heard, is that much of the remainder consists of odd scraps intended to punctuate the drama, so it doesn't sit well without context. Context was therefore provided in the form of an actor named Itay Tiran, who sat in the back of the orchestra with a body mike and read a narration consisting almost entirely of dialogue from the play, his rendering of the voices of Oberon, Puck, Titania, Bottom, and Theseus differing sufficiently from each other to be comical. Tiran is Israeli, but unlike many Israelis he doesn't have a heavy accent; on the other hand, I could not always make out what he was saying. The narration worked its way between, around, over, and even through the music. When Tiran first started speaking while the Overture was still playing, for a moment I thought the hall's PA system had gone mad. The program book certainly had gone mad, informing us that the Italian Symphony was written circa 1730, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1776. I don't think so.
The one other thing I need to say about Mendelssohn's Midsummer is that, if you know Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, and then hear Mendelssohn's settings of Shakespeare's two fairy songs (here with the SF Girls Chorus, very fine) for the first time, you are in for a real shock. Sullivan stole it all from Mendelssohn, he licked his boots, he used a photocopier, whatever metaphor you want. The resemblance is as uncanny as Mendelssohn's own ability at the age of 34 to write the incidental music and recapture the youthful inspiration with which he'd written the overture as a concert piece at the age of 17, younger than even Mozart wrote anything equally good.
Yesterday we had an all-Mendelssohn program to make up for this. Kurt Masur, formerly Felix's distant successor as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, inched out on stage, older and frailer than when I'd last seen him, looking in fact much like an emaciated version of the late Richard Gruen. This did not prevent him, with his usual minimal gestures, from leading totally winning, boundingly vital, cheerfully brisk, harmonically rich, and utterly confident performances of the Italian Symphony and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The problem with playing the complete Midsummer Night's Dream incidental music, and not just the suite of the overture and 3 or 4 intermezzi more often heard, is that much of the remainder consists of odd scraps intended to punctuate the drama, so it doesn't sit well without context. Context was therefore provided in the form of an actor named Itay Tiran, who sat in the back of the orchestra with a body mike and read a narration consisting almost entirely of dialogue from the play, his rendering of the voices of Oberon, Puck, Titania, Bottom, and Theseus differing sufficiently from each other to be comical. Tiran is Israeli, but unlike many Israelis he doesn't have a heavy accent; on the other hand, I could not always make out what he was saying. The narration worked its way between, around, over, and even through the music. When Tiran first started speaking while the Overture was still playing, for a moment I thought the hall's PA system had gone mad. The program book certainly had gone mad, informing us that the Italian Symphony was written circa 1730, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1776. I don't think so.
The one other thing I need to say about Mendelssohn's Midsummer is that, if you know Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, and then hear Mendelssohn's settings of Shakespeare's two fairy songs (here with the SF Girls Chorus, very fine) for the first time, you are in for a real shock. Sullivan stole it all from Mendelssohn, he licked his boots, he used a photocopier, whatever metaphor you want. The resemblance is as uncanny as Mendelssohn's own ability at the age of 34 to write the incidental music and recapture the youthful inspiration with which he'd written the overture as a concert piece at the age of 17, younger than even Mozart wrote anything equally good.
