concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Apr. 3rd, 2014 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacWeek one of the annual Blomstedt fortnight, so I wasn't going to miss this.
Fine concert, with Nielsen's Clarinet Concerto (you don't get to hear that very often) thoughtfully and finely etched by SFS principal Carey Bell, and a nice expansive performance of Schubert's Great C Major Symphony. Didn't run out of energy as Blomstedt often does; indeed, the serenely jaunting rhythms of the trio and the finale were the best thing in the piece.
So apart from noting in passing that my part of the hall was filled with young people (the kind of classical listeners that Greg Sandow believes do not exist), I will devote my energy to fuming at the historical ineptness of James M. Keller's program notes on the Schubert.
First off, this is not a symphony nicknamed "The Great", still less because Schubert said he was writing a "grosse Sinfonie." In Schubert's time, that was a genre description, the new-fangled, larger kind of symphony, as opposed to the smaller ones that Schubert had written before, following Haydn and Mozart. It's properly called the "Great C Major" to distinguish it from the "Little C Major", which is one of those six earlier, smaller, Schubert symphonies. Clear?
The reason for needing this is that Schubert never numbered his own symphonies, and later numbering by scholars is not always clear. It's true that this symphony has been known as no. 7, no. 8, and no. 9 at various times - but not, despite Keller's claim, as no. 10 - but he gets the reason wrong. When the Unfinished was numbered 8 and the Great C Major 9, it wasn't, as Keller says, to hold the number 7 open for the mysterious Gastein Symphony (Schubert's letters said he was working on a symphony during an 1825 vacation in that town, and for decades scholars wondered what had become of it), but for a full-length but unorchestrated sketch in E Major from 1821. In any case the Gastein postdated the Unfinished, while the E Major predated it. If no. 7 is a placeholder for the Gastein, then the numbering makes no sense.
Still less, as Keller doesn't say but implies, did the number 7 for this symphony come about when it was discovered that the Great C Major apparently was the Gastein, the purloined letter hiding in plain sight all along. (Keller says we now "know" this: in fact we don't know it for sure; it's just a plausible surmise that fits the facts better than any other ideas.) In fact, 7 was the earliest number given to this symphony, by Schubert's brother, who apparently didn't know about the E Major or the Unfinished.
A quick look at a book called Schubert and the Symphony by Brian Newbould, the leading scholar of same, would have cleared all that up. This is an error as bad as saying that Mozart wrote 41 symphonies.
Fine concert, with Nielsen's Clarinet Concerto (you don't get to hear that very often) thoughtfully and finely etched by SFS principal Carey Bell, and a nice expansive performance of Schubert's Great C Major Symphony. Didn't run out of energy as Blomstedt often does; indeed, the serenely jaunting rhythms of the trio and the finale were the best thing in the piece.
So apart from noting in passing that my part of the hall was filled with young people (the kind of classical listeners that Greg Sandow believes do not exist), I will devote my energy to fuming at the historical ineptness of James M. Keller's program notes on the Schubert.
First off, this is not a symphony nicknamed "The Great", still less because Schubert said he was writing a "grosse Sinfonie." In Schubert's time, that was a genre description, the new-fangled, larger kind of symphony, as opposed to the smaller ones that Schubert had written before, following Haydn and Mozart. It's properly called the "Great C Major" to distinguish it from the "Little C Major", which is one of those six earlier, smaller, Schubert symphonies. Clear?
The reason for needing this is that Schubert never numbered his own symphonies, and later numbering by scholars is not always clear. It's true that this symphony has been known as no. 7, no. 8, and no. 9 at various times - but not, despite Keller's claim, as no. 10 - but he gets the reason wrong. When the Unfinished was numbered 8 and the Great C Major 9, it wasn't, as Keller says, to hold the number 7 open for the mysterious Gastein Symphony (Schubert's letters said he was working on a symphony during an 1825 vacation in that town, and for decades scholars wondered what had become of it), but for a full-length but unorchestrated sketch in E Major from 1821. In any case the Gastein postdated the Unfinished, while the E Major predated it. If no. 7 is a placeholder for the Gastein, then the numbering makes no sense.
Still less, as Keller doesn't say but implies, did the number 7 for this symphony come about when it was discovered that the Great C Major apparently was the Gastein, the purloined letter hiding in plain sight all along. (Keller says we now "know" this: in fact we don't know it for sure; it's just a plausible surmise that fits the facts better than any other ideas.) In fact, 7 was the earliest number given to this symphony, by Schubert's brother, who apparently didn't know about the E Major or the Unfinished.
A quick look at a book called Schubert and the Symphony by Brian Newbould, the leading scholar of same, would have cleared all that up. This is an error as bad as saying that Mozart wrote 41 symphonies.
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no subject
Date: 2014-04-04 07:52 am (UTC)'The kind of classical listeners that Greg Sandow believes do not exist'
Hmmmm- we have a commercial classical station here, Classic FM, which has a large student age listenership and a pretty broad audience generally.