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Concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Peter Susskind, a wry expatriate Brit, is my favorite pre-concert lecturer. He began discussing tonight's program by saying, "Like most of his symphonies, Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 9 in D Minor begins with a string tremolo from which a theme slowly emerges." Then he began playing us a recording. After about ten seconds, enough time for perhaps half the audience to realize they were being had, he stopped it. "I'm sorry," he said ingenuously. "That was Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D Minor," which begins the same way. "This is the one I meant to play," and he gave us Bruckner's.
The point that the opening of Beethoven's Ninth generated, like an acorn an oak forest, the entirety of Bruckner's symphonic output has been made before. But not quite so cleverly.
The guest conductor was Kurt Masur. Somehow I'd never taken to his recordings. But a few years ago I saw some clips of him conducting Pictures at an Exhibition in a TV program on conductors and was stunned by how good he could be. So I didn't want to miss this. It was worth the trip, my second to the City in two days.
Bruckner's Ninth is a huge, monumental work - one movement of it could eat alive an entire Mozart symphony (we had a crisp, jolly runthrough of his Linz Symphony as an appetizer). It's over an hour long, and that's even without the last movement, which the composer didn't live to write. (He left lots of sketches, but attempts by others to patch the movement together have not been successful. Bruckner's genius lies not in the content, but the construction.)
Masur wanted that opening hum to sound as if it was already there before you could hear it, and it did. He wanted big bold climaxes, and got those too, with no help from the hall, which has a reverb of about two seconds. I thought the repetition in the work did not all sound inevitable and necessary, which was a weakness, but overall I was satisfied. It's been too long since I had a good long wallow in Bruckner. I'm going back in a couple weeks to hear Herbert Blomstedt, one of the master Brucknerians, do the Eighth - which, because the composer finished it, is even bigger. I can't wait.
The point that the opening of Beethoven's Ninth generated, like an acorn an oak forest, the entirety of Bruckner's symphonic output has been made before. But not quite so cleverly.
The guest conductor was Kurt Masur. Somehow I'd never taken to his recordings. But a few years ago I saw some clips of him conducting Pictures at an Exhibition in a TV program on conductors and was stunned by how good he could be. So I didn't want to miss this. It was worth the trip, my second to the City in two days.
Bruckner's Ninth is a huge, monumental work - one movement of it could eat alive an entire Mozart symphony (we had a crisp, jolly runthrough of his Linz Symphony as an appetizer). It's over an hour long, and that's even without the last movement, which the composer didn't live to write. (He left lots of sketches, but attempts by others to patch the movement together have not been successful. Bruckner's genius lies not in the content, but the construction.)
Masur wanted that opening hum to sound as if it was already there before you could hear it, and it did. He wanted big bold climaxes, and got those too, with no help from the hall, which has a reverb of about two seconds. I thought the repetition in the work did not all sound inevitable and necessary, which was a weakness, but overall I was satisfied. It's been too long since I had a good long wallow in Bruckner. I'm going back in a couple weeks to hear Herbert Blomstedt, one of the master Brucknerians, do the Eighth - which, because the composer finished it, is even bigger. I can't wait.