![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
concert review: California Symphony
May. 4th, 2025 09:11 amThis is the kind of program I like to hear: two big, dark-toned, heavyweight symphonies from the major repertoire: Schubert's "Unfinished," and Bruckner's Ninth, which is also unfinished.
Both were certainly intended by their composers to be standard four-movement symphonies, but only parts of the works got completed: two movements in Schubert's case, three in Bruckner's. Owing to different placements of the slow movement, both symphonies end with it, quietly in a dying fall. There have been attempts to finish both of them off, but they don't work, because you need the original composer's genius to do it. (And that is the same reason I'm not interested in Tolkien fan fiction.)
Schubert's "Unfinished," which gets played fairly often, received a pretty standard basic run-through here. This is the symphony with which Schubert, previously a chipper Mozartean in his symphonies, got with the Beethoven program of heavy dramatic works. Pre-concert lecturer Scott Foglesong opined that Schubert actually went beyond Beethoven here and essentially brought the Gothic cultural movement of the day into the symphony. And I've certainly heard it played that way, but there was nothing Gothic looming over this performance. The strings were strong and full, enough so that wind solos sounded slightly lost in the breeze.
Bruckner, though - here the orchestra was ideally balanced between sections and the music was played with full passion and dedication. The Ninth isn't played very often. I most recently heard it in London, before the pandemic, from Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn't terribly impressed with that performance. Is Bruckner just not Rattle's thing? I wondered. So I was pleased to be able to tell a couple of the Cal Sym musicians - you often run into them after a concert, because they park in the same adjacent garage that the audience does - that they gave a more effective performance of this than the Berlin Philharmonic did.
It felt as if conductor Donato Cabrera was taking this pretty speedily, though it was not a briefer than standard performance. Where Foglesong had cautioned that Bruckner's music exists in a timeless space, you're not supposed to expect anything to happen, Cabrera falsified this one by focusing on the flow and the events of the music. I found it dramatic, eventful, and riveting of my attention all the way through the 65 minutes. Especially fine were the way he ramped up the end of the first movement to its shatteringly intense ending, and then ramped down the conclusion of the slow movement from the climax to its gentle finish.
Both were certainly intended by their composers to be standard four-movement symphonies, but only parts of the works got completed: two movements in Schubert's case, three in Bruckner's. Owing to different placements of the slow movement, both symphonies end with it, quietly in a dying fall. There have been attempts to finish both of them off, but they don't work, because you need the original composer's genius to do it. (And that is the same reason I'm not interested in Tolkien fan fiction.)
Schubert's "Unfinished," which gets played fairly often, received a pretty standard basic run-through here. This is the symphony with which Schubert, previously a chipper Mozartean in his symphonies, got with the Beethoven program of heavy dramatic works. Pre-concert lecturer Scott Foglesong opined that Schubert actually went beyond Beethoven here and essentially brought the Gothic cultural movement of the day into the symphony. And I've certainly heard it played that way, but there was nothing Gothic looming over this performance. The strings were strong and full, enough so that wind solos sounded slightly lost in the breeze.
Bruckner, though - here the orchestra was ideally balanced between sections and the music was played with full passion and dedication. The Ninth isn't played very often. I most recently heard it in London, before the pandemic, from Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. I wasn't terribly impressed with that performance. Is Bruckner just not Rattle's thing? I wondered. So I was pleased to be able to tell a couple of the Cal Sym musicians - you often run into them after a concert, because they park in the same adjacent garage that the audience does - that they gave a more effective performance of this than the Berlin Philharmonic did.
It felt as if conductor Donato Cabrera was taking this pretty speedily, though it was not a briefer than standard performance. Where Foglesong had cautioned that Bruckner's music exists in a timeless space, you're not supposed to expect anything to happen, Cabrera falsified this one by focusing on the flow and the events of the music. I found it dramatic, eventful, and riveting of my attention all the way through the 65 minutes. Especially fine were the way he ramped up the end of the first movement to its shatteringly intense ending, and then ramped down the conclusion of the slow movement from the climax to its gentle finish.
