concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

Often, a famous composer's last works will assume a retroactively valedictory air. But there's nothing in the classical repertoire more obviously intended as its composer's final word than Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony. He was in his early sixties and already in seriously declining health when he wrote it in 1966-69, and what should he turn out but a song cycle - for two singers and a small chamber orchestra of strings and percussion - of eleven poems, all of them on the subject of Death. Talk about morbid. Some of the settings are active in a frantic, danse macabre kind of way - a mood Shostakovich found easier in his later years to depict than genuine wit - but most of them are just ose. ("Ose, ose, and morose," as we used to say about stagnant, downbeat songs in filking circles.) So powerfully depressing is this work that a major Soviet official rushed out of the hall in the middle of the first Moscow performance. People thought he was expressing his disapproval, but no, he'd just suffered what would shortly become a fatal heart attack.

At yesterday's performance, Sergei Leiferkus had just the kind of deep, hollowly echoing baritone voice needed to put across these spit-spewing Russian syllables. He was not well matched, however, with Olga Guryakova, whose rounded soprano was too smooth for the material, as well as being frequently too weak to be heard over the restrained accompaniment, and so pearly in diction that the words were unintelligible. Despite conductor James Conlon's admonition to the audience that this is a work that's about its words, so we should follow the transliterated and translated lyrics in our program books, I lost my place early in song #3 and never quite got it back.

(Ironically, unlike that Soviet official, Shostakovich did not die immediately after completing this work. He lived for another six years and wrote, among other things, a fifteenth symphony, emotively as cryptic and indecipherable a work as exists in the repertoire. After knifing yourself in the Fourteenth, what else is there left to say?)

Because Shostakovich had modeled his work on Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, it was followed by no, not that, but Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (another death-oriented work, as the exhibition it depicts was of an artist, a friend of the composer's, who'd just died), as mediated by the colorful orchestration of Maurice Ravel. Good performance: technically impressive, interpretatively satisfactory, nothing more to say than that.

Except that, although the Shostakovich was played first and the Mussorgsky is much briefer, half the audience didn't show up until after intermission. They really, really didn't want to hear the Song Cycle of Death (whereas I really did), but they were willing to wait over an hour to pop in for a piece only 30 minutes long. Wait till next week, when Conlon conducts Verdi's Requiem - a mass for the dead, don't forget - and nothing else. (I won't be there; I traded in my ticket for this one. As I said, I really wanted to hear this.)

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I saw the Shostakovich; Guryakova was audible at all times from Orch S 24. Either she had a better night tonight or the quirks of Davies strike again...incredible piece, great performances (including Guryakova tonight, despite the mush-mouthed diction).

Uh, we didn't stick around for the Mussorgsky. Despite Conlon's spiel, I wasn't buying that it would sound better than trivial after the deadly serious Shostakovich, which I thought a lot more closely connected in tone to Boris than Pictures.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

(Buying a $20 rush makes it easy to just head home, too.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Pictures certainly sounded a bit odd in such company, though I know it too well to have my overall opinion of it altered by such context.

I wonder how Night on Bald Mountain would have sounded in its place? Unexpectedly profound, or utterly risible? And if they wanted a short second half, that's really short.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

(Oh, forgot to mention, I was there last night, not Friday.)

I'd pair this piece with a performance of Janacek's From the House of the Dead, which is grim but ends on a note of hope and has equally magnificent and powerful music.

[(Anonymous)]

Funny you should mention Janáček. Prompted by this post, I listened to recordings of Shostakovich's 14th and 15th symphonies, neither of which I knew, and at times the soprano part in the 14th suggested to me some passages in Janáček's Káťa Kabanová (the only opera of his I've ever heard).

-MTD/neb

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I can't recommend the Boulez/Chereau DVD of From the House of the Dead highly enough. Great production and performances all around, fabulous work.