concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Peter Oundjian, the Great Explaining Conductor, returned to town and Explained to us how Brahms's Third is a great symphony. It was great enough in his hands, not a flowing entity but a tightly burnished one, as if it were a machine that he had carefully disassembled and lovingly oiled each part before putting it back together again. It was phrase- and bar-oriented, each moment asserting its distinct individuality of sound and texture from adjacent moments, while asserting connections to those further off, so it wasn't, like, incoherent or anything of that sort. Beautifully done, while different from other good performances.

Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, with Jonathan Biss, was a bit less amenable to this treatment, coming off too light, brightly lit, and slightly rigid rather than gracefully flowing. It's a marvelous concerto anyway, and the finale danced with sprightliness out of the bed of the slow movement, as it always does.

Appropriately, then, the modern piece opening the program was Rouse's The Infernal Machine, an almost postminimalist whirl. Have decided by this point that the machine in question is a broken-down dishwasher.

For dinner beforehand, finally got to the Chinese place with the dry fried chicken wings. Oh lordy.