concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Oct. 29th, 2010 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacAs this was a matinee, so I didn't have to worry about scarce late-night trains, I considered taking CalTrain to the city. But a combination of worrying about rare parking at my local station, combined with the fact that I was going to Borderlands in the Mission1 afterwards, from which finding a bus to a train station that matched up with an early evening train that stopped at my station turned out to be a headache I'm sorry is wished on those who have no choice, caused me to give up, and I drove to the end of the BART line in Millbrae instead. If they want me to take CalTrain, they'll run it more like BART.
I went to hear Pablo Heras-Casado - like so many other young male conductors, with the hair of Simon Rattle, and he conducts rather like him too - lead Shostakovich's Twelfth Symphony. I'm not entirely sure, but I think I have now heard all 15 of Shostakovich's symphonies in concert. The Twelfth is a rare one; like the Second and Third, even rarer2, it's impossible to disguise it as anything other than what it is, a raw hunk of Soviet propaganda tossed out to appease the commissars, except that this is late mid-period Shostakovich, not a scrap of the earlier works' experimental modernism in it. It has a long quiet slow movement, but otherwise screams pompously a lot, without the chills or subtle weavings of the Tenth and Eleventh. It takes some work to put it across, and I thought H-C handled it pretty well, by skimming at top speed through the first movement and slowing way down for the second.
Other than Mendelssohn's Hebrides, an old favorite played rather as if they were blowing the dust off it, the rest of the concert was of less interest to me. Liszt's First Piano Concerto is empty bombast as far as I'm concerned (so is the Shostakovich, I suppose, but some empty bombast is more interesting than others), and the pianist, Alice Sara Ott, played with a unique combination of simultaneous feathery lightness and stomping weight. The best metaphor I can come with is having a small child throw wooden number blocks at you.
Then there was György Kurtág's Grabstein für Stephan, a notable contribution to the "What is this cr*p?" modernist sweepstakes. A solo acoustic guitar - performer unnamed in the program book, though the work appears to be nominally a guitar concerto - plays an only minutely varied upward arpeggio, over and over like Benjamin Bagby crossed with Chinese water torture3, while the rest of the chamber orchestra gesticulates Webernishly, trying to be quiet enough to enable the guitar to be heard over it. Should be under a Grabstein (tombstone), not on it.
1. Where I found a copy of this. Hotcha!
2. I heard those when I timed a trip to LA to coincide with that concert in the LA Philharmonic's Shostakovich cycle. I figured I'd never get another chance.
3. As with Shostakovich teaching Liszt how to write interesting bombast, this is a case of Kurtág demonstrating by negative example that the minimalists know how to do this sort of thing right.
I went to hear Pablo Heras-Casado - like so many other young male conductors, with the hair of Simon Rattle, and he conducts rather like him too - lead Shostakovich's Twelfth Symphony. I'm not entirely sure, but I think I have now heard all 15 of Shostakovich's symphonies in concert. The Twelfth is a rare one; like the Second and Third, even rarer2, it's impossible to disguise it as anything other than what it is, a raw hunk of Soviet propaganda tossed out to appease the commissars, except that this is late mid-period Shostakovich, not a scrap of the earlier works' experimental modernism in it. It has a long quiet slow movement, but otherwise screams pompously a lot, without the chills or subtle weavings of the Tenth and Eleventh. It takes some work to put it across, and I thought H-C handled it pretty well, by skimming at top speed through the first movement and slowing way down for the second.
Other than Mendelssohn's Hebrides, an old favorite played rather as if they were blowing the dust off it, the rest of the concert was of less interest to me. Liszt's First Piano Concerto is empty bombast as far as I'm concerned (so is the Shostakovich, I suppose, but some empty bombast is more interesting than others), and the pianist, Alice Sara Ott, played with a unique combination of simultaneous feathery lightness and stomping weight. The best metaphor I can come with is having a small child throw wooden number blocks at you.
Then there was György Kurtág's Grabstein für Stephan, a notable contribution to the "What is this cr*p?" modernist sweepstakes. A solo acoustic guitar - performer unnamed in the program book, though the work appears to be nominally a guitar concerto - plays an only minutely varied upward arpeggio, over and over like Benjamin Bagby crossed with Chinese water torture3, while the rest of the chamber orchestra gesticulates Webernishly, trying to be quiet enough to enable the guitar to be heard over it. Should be under a Grabstein (tombstone), not on it.
1. Where I found a copy of this. Hotcha!
2. I heard those when I timed a trip to LA to coincide with that concert in the LA Philharmonic's Shostakovich cycle. I figured I'd never get another chance.
3. As with Shostakovich teaching Liszt how to write interesting bombast, this is a case of Kurtág demonstrating by negative example that the minimalists know how to do this sort of thing right.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-29 09:08 pm (UTC)(I also like the Liszt, but that is probably because the two stock Liszt concerti were one of the first records my family ever owned, and it's thus part of my music-loving DNA, flash nonsense and all.)