concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Oct. 20th, 2005 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacUp to Berkeley yesterday for some errands: at the music library, looked over the score for a work I'll be reviewing at a concert this weekend; at the main library, looked over a couple books that will need to turn up in this year's Tolkien studies review. Also, was pleased that Amoeba Music would take all the old classical LPs I brought them. I'll have to bring them some more: I have a couple hundred surplus here.
Exchanged hi's with fellow reviewer Lisa Irontongue on Telegraph. Funny how I rarely see people I know on the street around here: once every year or two if that. In Seattle it happens all the time, even when I'm only visiting.
Then off to the City by BART for a concert. Jean-Yves Thibaudet got a rave review from Alex Ross for performing Gershwin's Concerto in F in Boston, and he banged it out here with careless joie de vivre to great success. I thought of Gershwin, successful master at jazz and musical theater, so seriously wishing for respectability as a classical composer. But rather than barging in heedlessly, he proceeded with humility and diligence, consulting with his seniors (Igor Stravinsky told him, "You make so much more money than I do, you should be teaching me"), buying a textbook of orchestration and actually studying it, and writing this piano concerto: his first work to a classical model, and the first he did all by himself (orchestration is usually the last thing a composer wanna-be cares to learn). And it's not a bad work, though the slow parts sound like discarded outtakes from Rachmaninoff.
But I was there to hear Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony, possibly the century's masterpiece in its genre. Conductor Peter Oundjian is of the school that believes (as he explained to us before the work, in a very Terry Jones-like voice) that this alternately violent and eerie work encodes the composer's reactions to World War II and/or the prospect of nuclear war. This is a very widespread opinion, though (as Oundjian did not explain to us) it used to infuriate the composer. Oundjian's opinion that the scherzo encodes a V2 bombing raid might diminish the movement for the listener, but it is at least a useful fiction for Oundjian himself to believe, as the movement unfolded with a thunderous intensity evoking the similar Shostakovich scherzi often believed (equally speciously) to be portraits of Stalin.
The opening movements were also good, and in the first and third (the scherzo) the performance brought out the occasional touch of jazz embodied by the prominent saxophone part - the connection, no doubt, with Gershwin. The hushed post-holocaust voice-from-the-grave Epilogue, however, was too fast and far, far too loud. The orchestra wantonly ignored the composer's repeated instructions of pp senza cresc. [translation: Very quiet. Don't get louder!], and the oboe solo near the end rose to at least mezzo forte. Tisk.
Exchanged hi's with fellow reviewer Lisa Irontongue on Telegraph. Funny how I rarely see people I know on the street around here: once every year or two if that. In Seattle it happens all the time, even when I'm only visiting.
Then off to the City by BART for a concert. Jean-Yves Thibaudet got a rave review from Alex Ross for performing Gershwin's Concerto in F in Boston, and he banged it out here with careless joie de vivre to great success. I thought of Gershwin, successful master at jazz and musical theater, so seriously wishing for respectability as a classical composer. But rather than barging in heedlessly, he proceeded with humility and diligence, consulting with his seniors (Igor Stravinsky told him, "You make so much more money than I do, you should be teaching me"), buying a textbook of orchestration and actually studying it, and writing this piano concerto: his first work to a classical model, and the first he did all by himself (orchestration is usually the last thing a composer wanna-be cares to learn). And it's not a bad work, though the slow parts sound like discarded outtakes from Rachmaninoff.
But I was there to hear Vaughan Williams's Sixth Symphony, possibly the century's masterpiece in its genre. Conductor Peter Oundjian is of the school that believes (as he explained to us before the work, in a very Terry Jones-like voice) that this alternately violent and eerie work encodes the composer's reactions to World War II and/or the prospect of nuclear war. This is a very widespread opinion, though (as Oundjian did not explain to us) it used to infuriate the composer. Oundjian's opinion that the scherzo encodes a V2 bombing raid might diminish the movement for the listener, but it is at least a useful fiction for Oundjian himself to believe, as the movement unfolded with a thunderous intensity evoking the similar Shostakovich scherzi often believed (equally speciously) to be portraits of Stalin.
The opening movements were also good, and in the first and third (the scherzo) the performance brought out the occasional touch of jazz embodied by the prominent saxophone part - the connection, no doubt, with Gershwin. The hushed post-holocaust voice-from-the-grave Epilogue, however, was too fast and far, far too loud. The orchestra wantonly ignored the composer's repeated instructions of pp senza cresc. [translation: Very quiet. Don't get louder!], and the oboe solo near the end rose to at least mezzo forte. Tisk.
