Concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Apr. 9th, 2005 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacGuest conductor Kurt Masur, whom I heard last week, hasn't gone away. On Thursday he brought the Symphony down for one of its occasional engagements at Flint Center near my home, so this time I went to hear them perform Brahms's Second Symphony and Alfred Schnittke's First Cello Concerto (with Natalia Gutman for whom it was written).
Schnittke is a highly eclectic and referential composer whose work I've never really gotten a handle on. Certainly this concerto was a strange thing with many emotional outbursts that was easier to admire than it was to like. The slow last movement, though, was largely diatonic though not consonant, and was therefore better able to make its effects. That's the part the composer wrote after he recovered from a stroke that left him in a coma for three weeks, which I wouldn't recommend as a technique for altering your compositional style. Overall, this was akin to that part of the Eastern European mystic movement that is farthest removed from western minimalism: I begin to see Schnittke's resemblance to Kancheli or to the earlier, lesser-known works of Gorecki.
Brahms's Second is thought of as his pastoral symphony, but this was a powerful, gutsy performance far from that image. We were seated near the cellos, and I decided to devote most of my attention to listening to them. Poor cellos: they don't get the spotlight much here. It's the violas that play that wonderful theme in the first movement and get all the interesting fiddly bits in the second. Though the cellos do have a nice pizzicato accompaniment to the theme of the third movement. Overall Brahms has such a thoroughly blended sound that to pull any instrument out of the mix is to hear something startling and unfamiliar.
Schnittke is a highly eclectic and referential composer whose work I've never really gotten a handle on. Certainly this concerto was a strange thing with many emotional outbursts that was easier to admire than it was to like. The slow last movement, though, was largely diatonic though not consonant, and was therefore better able to make its effects. That's the part the composer wrote after he recovered from a stroke that left him in a coma for three weeks, which I wouldn't recommend as a technique for altering your compositional style. Overall, this was akin to that part of the Eastern European mystic movement that is farthest removed from western minimalism: I begin to see Schnittke's resemblance to Kancheli or to the earlier, lesser-known works of Gorecki.
Brahms's Second is thought of as his pastoral symphony, but this was a powerful, gutsy performance far from that image. We were seated near the cellos, and I decided to devote most of my attention to listening to them. Poor cellos: they don't get the spotlight much here. It's the violas that play that wonderful theme in the first movement and get all the interesting fiddly bits in the second. Though the cellos do have a nice pizzicato accompaniment to the theme of the third movement. Overall Brahms has such a thoroughly blended sound that to pull any instrument out of the mix is to hear something startling and unfamiliar.
