concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

This is the second orchestral concert I've been to this month that turned out to be partially a chamber music concert. The lucky music was Stravinsky's Octet for winds and brass, a work complex enough that it's often played with a conductor, but though one was available tonight, he did not participate. Technically lovely playing by the chosen orchestra members, but interpretatively dry. The best moment was the cute little tutti "blat" that ends the piece.

Also Stravinskian on the program, the complete Pulcinella conducted by MTT. When played in full, this has three vocal soloists. Mezzo strong-voiced. Tenor excellent tone, but not enough power. Basso so profundo he sounded strangled. If a dog whistle is too high for a human to hear, what do you call a sound too low to hear?

Again, technically fine orchestral work - though some of the rhythms sounded a bit off - but something was lacking. Both these works date from the early 1920s, a period when Stravinsky made something of a fetish of being emotionally uninvolved with his own music. Correspondingly, I find it equally hard to get emotionally involved with his music of this period as a listener, and however agreeable it sounds, I get itchy. I like both earlier and later Stravinsky much better.

These works surrounded a Mozart piano concerto, K. 488. And the special guest soloist was ... surprise! MTT! This is supposed to be the work that ended his career as a piano soloist years ago, when (as I hear it) during a performance he fell through a hole in the stage (!) and broke his wrist. Nothing like getting back on the horse you fell off of, I guess, so here he was to play it in a pearly style, and nominally to conduct as well, but sightlines were bad (half the orchestra was behind him as he sat at the keyboard, and the other half couldn't see him through the raised piano lid), and so his occasional arm gestures served mostly as an acknowledgment that he cared what the orchestra was doing.

This concerto's instrumentation is big on the winds, which assisted the perception that, placed as the filler in a Stravinsky-bread sandwich, it sounded rather as if he'd written it and had just left all his angularity at home that day.

(Dinner at usual local restaurant. Best meal I've had there - the menu changes daily, so you never know what you might get; this time it was a sort of semi-Portuguese clam stew - but not so great when the waiter bumps up the menu price on the check by two bucks, and neither brings the required condiments nor shows up to ask how everything is so we could remind him.)

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

If a dog whistle is too high for a human to hear, what do you call a sound too low to hear?

Assuming that was a real question - subsonics.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Doesn't subsonic mean "below Mach 1"? Actually, wikipedia says the correct term is "infrasonics", but I was hoping for "X whistle", the equivalent of "dog whistle", where X is an animal that hears at those frequencies. Possibly X would be Cthulhu, so I'm not sure there'd be much of a market for the whistle.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

You're quite right. Terminal brainfart.

And I kind of like the idea of a Cthulhu whistle...

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

But you wouldn't want the Cthulhu whistle blown when you were nearby.

;-)