concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

"I'll see you after Mozart dies," I said cheerfully to my traveling companions, as we all headed off to our separate seats in Davies to hear the Requiem he died in the middle of composing. Of. (It feels like there's a preposition missing somewhere in that sentence.)

The problem with the Mozart Requiem is that Franz Süssmayr, the pupil who edited and finished the work off,* wasn't Mozart, and the final movements, which he had to write from scratch, lack a certain degree of inspiration. MTT tried to compensate for this by becoming louder and brasher. Nice singing, though, particularly from the chorus.

Two really innnnteresting postmodern works began the program. A contemporary Lithuanian, Mindaugas Urbaitis, composed a short acappella choral work, conducted by the symphony chorus director, Ragnar Bohlin, which evolves the theme of Mozart's Lacrimosa (a movement of the Requiem) out of a series of minimalist approximations, rather akin to roughly chopping out a block of stone and then slowly polishing it into an elegant sculpture. Of course Urbaitis functionally wrote this work backwards, with the goal in existence before he started, but turned around and played forwards it was as effective as Shostakovich similarly evolving the DSCH theme in his Tenth Symphony.

Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman. I've been to the chapel in Houston that this piece is named for and was written to be performed in. I thought it was the biggest ripoff of an art installation I'd ever seen, this despite the fact that they don't charge anything to see it. I knew that Rothko was a minimalist painter, but I hadn't realized that even he would decorate a squat, ugly, and otherwise empty concrete octagonal chamber with 14 paintings every one of which is in flat undifferentiated black. But I like Feldman's music; why is that? Because for all his filling in of wide sound spaces with hushed and utter stillness, the music has content. The quietness forces you really to listen, and there's something to listen to. This is a chamber music work (like everything by Feldman I know), with performers spread over the wide stage: timpanist, percussionist, celesta, a chorus in back, a conductor, and a violist who wanders around the stage. Listen carefully to the violist's melody-like phrases, as the timpani rumble in the distance, xylophone and wood blocks inject tiny splashes of color, and the chorus hums "nnnn". For half an hour, quite hasty by Feldman's Entish standards.

*And if you think Antonio Salieri had anything whatsoever to do with Mozart's Requiem, you've been watching too many ahistorical movies!

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's not the color. One time when I was passing through a modern art gallery, where, as usual, some of the paintings struck me as imaginative or meaningful and some did not. But it was not until I saw a giant block of undifferentiated bright red on the wall that I thought, this is ridiculous, this artist is putting us on. It was by Rothko.

If an artist wants me to look at his paintings long enough to see changes that take that long to perceive, he should provide reasons to sit that long in the first place. I often say of minimalist music: after one minute it's arresting; after ten minutes it's excruciatingly boring; after thirty minutes you never want it to end. To get through the second stage to the third stage, you have to be able to start with the first stage. Rothko leaves out that part; other minimalist painters don't. I don't rate Pollock highly or find much meaning in his work, but unlike Rothko it is interesting at the one-minute level.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Do you happen to remember where that particular Rothko is? I've seen some that are single-color, but none that I'd describe as undifferentiated, at least not if what you mean is "looks like it was rolled on." The oil paints and brushwork in the paintings I have seen in person, on line, and in reproduction all lend a lot of detail to the canvases.

I'll also reiterate what I said: some of the effects of Rothko become visible after the five-minute mark.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I cannot remember the museum, alas. I remember that it was a huge painting dominating the end of a hallway, so I saw it and reacted to it long before I saw who painted it. Perhaps if I had stood and stared at it for ten minutes its glories would have been revealed, but two things prevented that: 1) as I suggested earlier, it gave me no reason to want to stare at it for even one minute; 2) I have never stared at any painting, no matter how great I found it or how moved I was by it, for more than 3 or 4 minutes in my entire life.