concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Mar. 31st, 2006 01:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacGuest conductor Mstislav Rostropovich is 79 years old. When I saw him last week doing the previous of his two all-Shostakovich concerts, he was a mere 78. Happy birthday, Mstislav.
This was a great idea for a Shostakovich sampler concert: three highly diverse works from three highly varied periods of his career. The earliest work was the Suite No. 1 for Jazz Orchestra, sometimes called the Jazz Suite for short, but that's misleading. Despite having heard some visiting American musicians (Sidney Bechet and Sam Wooding, if you know who they are: I don't, though Bechet's name is vaguely familiar), Shostakovich in isolated Russia in 1934 had no idea how to reproduce what jazz sounded like. (You should hear his "Soviet rock & roll" from 25 years later.) The Suite is really cafe music, though the orchestration is amusing, with a Hawaiian steel guitar popping up at one point, and the performance was most witty and really amused the audience. The young Shostakovich was really a most puckish composer until the censors squashed him in 1936.
The other end of his career was represented by the Violin Concerto No. 2, dating from 1967, the year after the composer's major heart attack. After that he wrote mostly just quiet, contemplative, often morbid, but surprisingly simple music, though the concerto - played here with great suavity of line by concertmaster Alexander Barantschik - is spikier and more like mid-period Shostakovich than most. Wonderful moment in this performance as the slow movement melts into the finale.
This concerto is rarely heard. Mostly you get the much bigger and bolder Concerto No. 1 from the late 1940s. Besides being less of a crowd-pleaser, No. 2 is in C Sharp Minor, a key to make most violinists say, "What the @#$()?" while most musicologists will say, "Aha, he's paying tribute to Beethoven's Op. 131 Quartet."
The big work was the Symphony No. 13, a song cycle rather than a traditional symphony, scored for solo bass singer, chorus of bass singers, and large orchestra. The five poems are all by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Kind of forgotten today, he was famous enough as a dissident poet in those days that he made the cover of Time the year this symphony premiered, 1962.
The premiere was actually a strange occasion. The authorities tried to lean on everyone involved to cancel the performance (including phoning the conductor to suggest that maybe he'd better just call in sick, which he handled by pretending not to know what they were insinuating), but they didn't actually stop it or arrest anybody. Instead they just threw a blanket over it. No review was published, further performances were mostly squashed, visiting scholars were not allowed to see the score, and nobody in the West had the slightest idea what the symphony contained until several years later, when the same M.L. Rostropovich mentioned above smuggled a score out and gave it to Eugene Ormandy of the Philadelphia Orchestra. I remember Ormandy's recording, which had a ripped-newspaper-headline cover with "Banned in Russia!" or words to that effect on it. Before then, silence: I have an article on Shostakovich published in 1967 openly wondering whether the 13th will be found to be more like the 12th or the 10th. Both wrong.
While no more dour than other symphonies of Shostakovich's middle period, the 13th is gnarlier than any of them except perhaps the 8th, starting with the creepy opening theme for brass which sounds like they're trying to claw themselves out of the grave. Appropriately, for the poem is Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar", which blames the 1941-2 massacres of Ukrainian Jews squarely on Russian anti-semitism. The poet empathizes with the Jews and expresses regret at not being Jewish himself. It was an appropriate text for Shostakovich to set, for there has never been a more philo-semitic gentile composer. He had set Yiddish poetry, used Jewish folk themes in his works, and generally identified himself with the Jews.
The "Babi Yar" movement is so moving and effective, it's a pity that the four following it don't measure up, good as they might be by themselves. Two are somber, two are rather wry; one of the latter extolls those like Galileo who take risks for their careers. Maybe the conductor who refused to cancel the performance had studied it and it stiffened his spine. (Enough previously-scheduled performers had apparently not read it and had already backed out.) In Thursday's performance, the orchestra was excellent and the chorus (last hurrah of retiring director Vance George) was wonderful. Alas, the voice of the soloist, Mikhail Petrenko, though deep and expressive was not very powerful and did not ride over the orchestra as it needed to.
This was a great idea for a Shostakovich sampler concert: three highly diverse works from three highly varied periods of his career. The earliest work was the Suite No. 1 for Jazz Orchestra, sometimes called the Jazz Suite for short, but that's misleading. Despite having heard some visiting American musicians (Sidney Bechet and Sam Wooding, if you know who they are: I don't, though Bechet's name is vaguely familiar), Shostakovich in isolated Russia in 1934 had no idea how to reproduce what jazz sounded like. (You should hear his "Soviet rock & roll" from 25 years later.) The Suite is really cafe music, though the orchestration is amusing, with a Hawaiian steel guitar popping up at one point, and the performance was most witty and really amused the audience. The young Shostakovich was really a most puckish composer until the censors squashed him in 1936.
The other end of his career was represented by the Violin Concerto No. 2, dating from 1967, the year after the composer's major heart attack. After that he wrote mostly just quiet, contemplative, often morbid, but surprisingly simple music, though the concerto - played here with great suavity of line by concertmaster Alexander Barantschik - is spikier and more like mid-period Shostakovich than most. Wonderful moment in this performance as the slow movement melts into the finale.
This concerto is rarely heard. Mostly you get the much bigger and bolder Concerto No. 1 from the late 1940s. Besides being less of a crowd-pleaser, No. 2 is in C Sharp Minor, a key to make most violinists say, "What the @#$()?" while most musicologists will say, "Aha, he's paying tribute to Beethoven's Op. 131 Quartet."
The big work was the Symphony No. 13, a song cycle rather than a traditional symphony, scored for solo bass singer, chorus of bass singers, and large orchestra. The five poems are all by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Kind of forgotten today, he was famous enough as a dissident poet in those days that he made the cover of Time the year this symphony premiered, 1962.
The premiere was actually a strange occasion. The authorities tried to lean on everyone involved to cancel the performance (including phoning the conductor to suggest that maybe he'd better just call in sick, which he handled by pretending not to know what they were insinuating), but they didn't actually stop it or arrest anybody. Instead they just threw a blanket over it. No review was published, further performances were mostly squashed, visiting scholars were not allowed to see the score, and nobody in the West had the slightest idea what the symphony contained until several years later, when the same M.L. Rostropovich mentioned above smuggled a score out and gave it to Eugene Ormandy of the Philadelphia Orchestra. I remember Ormandy's recording, which had a ripped-newspaper-headline cover with "Banned in Russia!" or words to that effect on it. Before then, silence: I have an article on Shostakovich published in 1967 openly wondering whether the 13th will be found to be more like the 12th or the 10th. Both wrong.
While no more dour than other symphonies of Shostakovich's middle period, the 13th is gnarlier than any of them except perhaps the 8th, starting with the creepy opening theme for brass which sounds like they're trying to claw themselves out of the grave. Appropriately, for the poem is Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar", which blames the 1941-2 massacres of Ukrainian Jews squarely on Russian anti-semitism. The poet empathizes with the Jews and expresses regret at not being Jewish himself. It was an appropriate text for Shostakovich to set, for there has never been a more philo-semitic gentile composer. He had set Yiddish poetry, used Jewish folk themes in his works, and generally identified himself with the Jews.
The "Babi Yar" movement is so moving and effective, it's a pity that the four following it don't measure up, good as they might be by themselves. Two are somber, two are rather wry; one of the latter extolls those like Galileo who take risks for their careers. Maybe the conductor who refused to cancel the performance had studied it and it stiffened his spine. (Enough previously-scheduled performers had apparently not read it and had already backed out.) In Thursday's performance, the orchestra was excellent and the chorus (last hurrah of retiring director Vance George) was wonderful. Alas, the voice of the soloist, Mikhail Petrenko, though deep and expressive was not very powerful and did not ride over the orchestra as it needed to.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-01 12:39 am (UTC)Now I'm off the topic of Bechet entirely, but just today I was listening to my Basin Street cuts again. I think my favorite is their treatment of "Basin Street Blues," in which each instrumentalists takes a chorus and bows out, thinning the texture until there's just a final solo by the bass player. So good. Chills down mine spine. I love it to pieces.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-01 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-01 09:57 am (UTC)