concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Apr. 2nd, 2010 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacLike a needle to a magnet, I was drawn up to the City for a rare chance to hear Shostakovich's Eighth, one of those gnarly masterworks that few people love but me.
Vasily Petrenko, living and working in England now, is one of the new crop (he's 33) of Russian conductors. This is his first visit to SFS. Thin, with a sober expression and close-cut hair, he resembles a young Sergei Rachmaninoff. His conducting is delicate and reserved: his Shostakovich is most notable for the quiet and contemplative passages, of which this symphony has many. The finale came out with just the right enigmatic shrug that it shares with the Piano Quintet. Petrenko does know how to let the momentum build up, which is the right way to handle Shostakovich's more dramatic passages, though he does not push for the last ounce of terror or anguish, as Dudamel for one would do. He alters his technique to fit the circumstances: some lyric phrases he shaped with only the left hand, while he led the "machine gun" scherzo with a crisp four-square beat in the baton. He blends and brings out the best in the orchestra's sound: the many exposed passages for flutes, piccolos, and English horn in particular were very fine.
In an apparent effort to prove that what works for one composer is totally inappropriate for another, Petrenko applied the same magic tricks to Grieg's Piano Concerto. His idea for weighting down this ball of fluff was to take it slowly and pompously, with an incongruously gorgeous, French impressionist orchestral sound. Soloist Simon Trpčeski played with the sort of sleeve-waving emotionalism associated with bad Chopin.
It may have been more popular with some, but to me it was the penance I had to wait through to get to Shostakovich.
Vasily Petrenko, living and working in England now, is one of the new crop (he's 33) of Russian conductors. This is his first visit to SFS. Thin, with a sober expression and close-cut hair, he resembles a young Sergei Rachmaninoff. His conducting is delicate and reserved: his Shostakovich is most notable for the quiet and contemplative passages, of which this symphony has many. The finale came out with just the right enigmatic shrug that it shares with the Piano Quintet. Petrenko does know how to let the momentum build up, which is the right way to handle Shostakovich's more dramatic passages, though he does not push for the last ounce of terror or anguish, as Dudamel for one would do. He alters his technique to fit the circumstances: some lyric phrases he shaped with only the left hand, while he led the "machine gun" scherzo with a crisp four-square beat in the baton. He blends and brings out the best in the orchestra's sound: the many exposed passages for flutes, piccolos, and English horn in particular were very fine.
In an apparent effort to prove that what works for one composer is totally inappropriate for another, Petrenko applied the same magic tricks to Grieg's Piano Concerto. His idea for weighting down this ball of fluff was to take it slowly and pompously, with an incongruously gorgeous, French impressionist orchestral sound. Soloist Simon Trpčeski played with the sort of sleeve-waving emotionalism associated with bad Chopin.
It may have been more popular with some, but to me it was the penance I had to wait through to get to Shostakovich.
