concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Oct. 15th, 2009 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOooh! Itzhak Perlman! He's famous! Even that wasn't quite enough to sell out Davies Hall, but the place was certainly more full than usual.
Like many soloist superstars, Perlman has been reinventing himself as a conductor, and made a good accounting for himself in that role last night, better indeed than as a violinist. His violin tone in Bach's E Major concerto was firm and constant but a little thin next to the supple and lovely sounds emerging from the orchestra, especially the cellos in the slow movement.
Moving into heavy-duty conductor territory, we got the Pathétique. I know this work is still performed, but I never hear it. Of Tchaikovsky's symphonies, I encounter the Fourth and Fifth, even the Second, repeatedly, but it's been years since I'd heard this one in concert. Well-molded restrained performance, almost Mozartean. Especially in the first movement the shining glow of his ballet music and suites was highly evident. The dramatic points got full measure (one nice thing about a seated conductor: it's harder for him to spoil the big surprise at the end of the first movement exposition, and the musicians were careful not to do so, either) but nothing was milked or throbbing. The strings were well under control, and the brighter inner movements didn't seem schizoid. The finale is about the most suicidal piece of music in the standard repertoire, and it stunned the audience enough to silence the early applauders until Perlman lowered his arms, but it wasn't catatonic.
Also on the program, Elgar's "Introduction and Allegro" for strings, a work I've never much cared for. I like to think that Vaughan Williams heard this and thought, "I can do this sort of thing much better than that," and five years later, he did. (I leave "What are you talking about?" as an exercise for the reader.)
Like many soloist superstars, Perlman has been reinventing himself as a conductor, and made a good accounting for himself in that role last night, better indeed than as a violinist. His violin tone in Bach's E Major concerto was firm and constant but a little thin next to the supple and lovely sounds emerging from the orchestra, especially the cellos in the slow movement.
Moving into heavy-duty conductor territory, we got the Pathétique. I know this work is still performed, but I never hear it. Of Tchaikovsky's symphonies, I encounter the Fourth and Fifth, even the Second, repeatedly, but it's been years since I'd heard this one in concert. Well-molded restrained performance, almost Mozartean. Especially in the first movement the shining glow of his ballet music and suites was highly evident. The dramatic points got full measure (one nice thing about a seated conductor: it's harder for him to spoil the big surprise at the end of the first movement exposition, and the musicians were careful not to do so, either) but nothing was milked or throbbing. The strings were well under control, and the brighter inner movements didn't seem schizoid. The finale is about the most suicidal piece of music in the standard repertoire, and it stunned the audience enough to silence the early applauders until Perlman lowered his arms, but it wasn't catatonic.
Also on the program, Elgar's "Introduction and Allegro" for strings, a work I've never much cared for. I like to think that Vaughan Williams heard this and thought, "I can do this sort of thing much better than that," and five years later, he did. (I leave "What are you talking about?" as an exercise for the reader.)
