concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Mar. 9th, 2006 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacVance George, the SFS's long-time chorus director, is retiring at the end of this season, and that's his shining mug on the cover of this month's program book. They're seeing him off with two big choral concerts this month: Shostakovich's Babi Yar three weeks from now, and a Haydn/Mozart fest this week, under Martin Haselböck, an 18th-century specialist from Vienna. I mean, both he and the music he specializes in are from Vienna. Only the music is from the 18th century, though I wouldn't count out the age of the maestro's wild white hair. It was a little bit as if Michael Foot were conducting.
The Haydn we heard, however, was all from his trips to London. "The Storm" is technically a madrigal, it says here, but it sure doesn't sound like one. It's a short poem, in English, describing a storm, with appropriately windy music. One line reads, "And now flashing through the skies," but on each of its several repetitions the verb came out sounding more like "flushing."
This was followed by a vocal but non-choral piece, "Berenice, che fai?", a mad scene (Haydn stole the libretto from a Baroque Italian opera) for soprano, here Christine Brandes, who has a deep, full voice and who raised her fist in anguish as her character curses the gods.
The chorus continued to sit there in the back, unmoving, as we turned to Haydn's Symphony No. 96 in D, often known as the Miracle Symphony. Despite the reduced size of the orchestra this was a full, slowish (except for the Adagio introduction, which was at least Andante in execution), genteel old-fashioned performance. It was very good, and I wish I could have enjoyed it more, but I was still on my last legs from the previous day's long plane flight, so I skipped out on the chorus's revenge, Mozart's Coronation Mass, in the second half, managed to make my way home, and collapsed.
The Haydn we heard, however, was all from his trips to London. "The Storm" is technically a madrigal, it says here, but it sure doesn't sound like one. It's a short poem, in English, describing a storm, with appropriately windy music. One line reads, "And now flashing through the skies," but on each of its several repetitions the verb came out sounding more like "flushing."
This was followed by a vocal but non-choral piece, "Berenice, che fai?", a mad scene (Haydn stole the libretto from a Baroque Italian opera) for soprano, here Christine Brandes, who has a deep, full voice and who raised her fist in anguish as her character curses the gods.
The chorus continued to sit there in the back, unmoving, as we turned to Haydn's Symphony No. 96 in D, often known as the Miracle Symphony. Despite the reduced size of the orchestra this was a full, slowish (except for the Adagio introduction, which was at least Andante in execution), genteel old-fashioned performance. It was very good, and I wish I could have enjoyed it more, but I was still on my last legs from the previous day's long plane flight, so I skipped out on the chorus's revenge, Mozart's Coronation Mass, in the second half, managed to make my way home, and collapsed.
