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]

I have had two encounters with Kurtág's music within the last few years. On both occasions - and I didn't even have a mental name-check to remember the first occasion when I wrote about the second, my reaction was as violently aversive as it is to Rothko. But I still like Feldman.