![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
concert review: San Francisco Symphony
May. 3rd, 2025 10:33 amI knew Giancarlo Guerrero as a bold and vigorous conductor. Here he led a program featuring music by two of the 20C's most colorful orchestrators, Igor Stravinsky and Ottorino Respighi (both of them pupils of Rimsky-Korsakov, the greatest orchestrator of his day).
From Igor, the full text of Petrushka, his second ballet, which came across as familiar nuggets floating in an uncharted soup. But it was sharp and colorful.
From Otto, two big colorful tone-poem suites, Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. The former has been overshadowed by the latter, but on its own it's an excellent work which deserves airing. What makes it fall behind is a tactical mistake, of putting the triumphant procession in the middle instead of, as in Pines, at the end.
Both were well played, not the most dazzling renditions I've heard, but good enough. Except that the extra brass players for the end of Pines, usually placed in the audience balcony for an interesting antiphonal effect, were here put in the terrace just behind the orchestra, where their impact was minimal.
Guerrero pointed out, introducing the pieces, that Pines is the first work of electronic music ever composed, requiring as it does a recording of a nightingale's call during a peaceful interlude. At one time, if you got a copy of the score it came with a 78-rpm record. "Anybody remember those?" he said.
Also on the program, a very short introductory piece by Kaija Saariaho, inspired by an earth-grazer asteroid named Toutatis, one of several pieces commissioned as supplements to Holst's Planets. It doesn't sound in the least as if it belongs there.
From Igor, the full text of Petrushka, his second ballet, which came across as familiar nuggets floating in an uncharted soup. But it was sharp and colorful.
From Otto, two big colorful tone-poem suites, Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. The former has been overshadowed by the latter, but on its own it's an excellent work which deserves airing. What makes it fall behind is a tactical mistake, of putting the triumphant procession in the middle instead of, as in Pines, at the end.
Both were well played, not the most dazzling renditions I've heard, but good enough. Except that the extra brass players for the end of Pines, usually placed in the audience balcony for an interesting antiphonal effect, were here put in the terrace just behind the orchestra, where their impact was minimal.
Guerrero pointed out, introducing the pieces, that Pines is the first work of electronic music ever composed, requiring as it does a recording of a nightingale's call during a peaceful interlude. At one time, if you got a copy of the score it came with a 78-rpm record. "Anybody remember those?" he said.
Also on the program, a very short introductory piece by Kaija Saariaho, inspired by an earth-grazer asteroid named Toutatis, one of several pieces commissioned as supplements to Holst's Planets. It doesn't sound in the least as if it belongs there.
