concert review: San Francisco Symphony
May. 11th, 2006 08:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacUnusual potpourri of a concert, led by the assistant conductor, Edwin Outwater, who grins like a fiend when he's successfully made it through a difficult work.
First half had three shortish pieces, Danses sacrée et profane by Debussy (essentially a small concerto for harp; soloist the orchestra's resident, one of those male harpists with a really strange beard), Bizet's tiny Jeux d'enfants suite, and Living Toys by Thomas Adès, a composer I've never been able to figure out what to do with.
All this prefatory to the second half, HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! (yes, exclamations are part of the title), a work I'd often seen references to but knew nothing of. To describe it as a cycle of gruesome and irreverent children's cabaret songs would be accurate, but entirely insufficient. Gruber, an Austrian in his sixties, wrote the piece thirty years ago as his declaration of independence from serialism, and has been going around the world performing it - both with the original German poems by HC Artmann and, as here, in a colloquial English translation by Harriett Watts, and maybe in other languages for all I know - ever since. Gruber defines his role in the performance as chansonnier. He speaks rhythmically rather than sings (a little like Sprechstimme, but not very much like it), rolls his r's in the word door until it sounds like a door creaking open, plays a melodica, grunts and squeaks, and just generally carries on deadpan. Meanwhile the orchestra plays music of a generally "son of Kurt Weill" type, interrupted by such events as: 1) the timpanist blows up paper bags, pops them, and throws them at his colleagues; 2) the entire wind and brass sections stand up and whirl plastic hosepipes over their heads (this also makes a sound, quiet but describable).
If this gives you the impression that Gruber's declaration of independence was to permit himself to have fun as much as to write tonal music, you've got it. More of an enjoyable than a memorable experience, I suppose, but worth having. I was dismayed at the number of empty seats. They're playing this again at Flint in Cupertino at 8 tonight, and again back at Davies Friday and Saturday evenings (Friday at 6:30 along with the Debussy only; full concert Saturday at 8), and I'd recommend that people go hear it. Genuine fun in classical music is too rare an experience.
First half had three shortish pieces, Danses sacrée et profane by Debussy (essentially a small concerto for harp; soloist the orchestra's resident, one of those male harpists with a really strange beard), Bizet's tiny Jeux d'enfants suite, and Living Toys by Thomas Adès, a composer I've never been able to figure out what to do with.
All this prefatory to the second half, HK Gruber's Frankenstein!! (yes, exclamations are part of the title), a work I'd often seen references to but knew nothing of. To describe it as a cycle of gruesome and irreverent children's cabaret songs would be accurate, but entirely insufficient. Gruber, an Austrian in his sixties, wrote the piece thirty years ago as his declaration of independence from serialism, and has been going around the world performing it - both with the original German poems by HC Artmann and, as here, in a colloquial English translation by Harriett Watts, and maybe in other languages for all I know - ever since. Gruber defines his role in the performance as chansonnier. He speaks rhythmically rather than sings (a little like Sprechstimme, but not very much like it), rolls his r's in the word door until it sounds like a door creaking open, plays a melodica, grunts and squeaks, and just generally carries on deadpan. Meanwhile the orchestra plays music of a generally "son of Kurt Weill" type, interrupted by such events as: 1) the timpanist blows up paper bags, pops them, and throws them at his colleagues; 2) the entire wind and brass sections stand up and whirl plastic hosepipes over their heads (this also makes a sound, quiet but describable).
If this gives you the impression that Gruber's declaration of independence was to permit himself to have fun as much as to write tonal music, you've got it. More of an enjoyable than a memorable experience, I suppose, but worth having. I was dismayed at the number of empty seats. They're playing this again at Flint in Cupertino at 8 tonight, and again back at Davies Friday and Saturday evenings (Friday at 6:30 along with the Debussy only; full concert Saturday at 8), and I'd recommend that people go hear it. Genuine fun in classical music is too rare an experience.
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Date: 2006-05-12 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-12 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-14 08:11 am (UTC)The symphony worked hard on the Adès. My take on the piece is that it's probably a lot of fun to play, because then you have a chance to get all the jokes. Otherwise, it seems to be a typically prickly and pretentious post-modern piece. I did really like the very brief quote from Raymond Scott's classic Powerhouse, I guess because I got the joke.
The Bizet was delightful, even if it did seem derivative of a great deal of music composed in the following century or so. Barantschik really shone in the cello-violin duo. I was reminded of his comment that his violin was terrible because if any note didn't sound exactly right, he couldn't blame it on the instrument. This time was the sweetest and clearest tone I've ever heard from a violin.
With the Gruber, I was wondering what you meant by enjoyable rather than memorable. Now that I've seen it, I would say the experience was both. Perhaps you meant the music? With the possible exception of The Rat Song, there didn't seem to be too much to it. Gruber's performance was extraordinary, and the way the symphony musicians wholeheartedly joined in was special. I wish that I had the chance to see it performed in a cabaret environment. There was much that was funny in the horrific and gruesome (and very fannish) children's rhymes. Unfortunately, the symphony audience's reaction was mostly to the unusual instrumentation, which while funny and part of the show, was not all it was about. At first, when the percussionist started exploding paper bags, there were titters of nervous laughter. While they laughed, I thought about what a sharp sound each bag made as it was exploded, and how well it fit, musically and symbolically, with the composition. The laughter grew to uncontrollable guffaws when half the orchestra whipped out the plastic hosepipes (what P.D.Q. Bach calls the lasso d'amore). A dozen hosepipes in a good hall makes quite an eerie sound, and I wish I could have heard it without all the yuks. After that the audience settled down, and I was able to enjoy the show more on its own terms. At least until we got to the Litany and the audience had to lose it over the symphony members standing up and singing as a chorus (and quite nicely too). What is so transgressive about specialized serious instrumentalists playing a toy instrument or (gasp) singing as part of a piece? In the meantime, the lyrics of Batman and Robin pass without notice, but then this is San Francisco, after all. Maybe the symphony should play Frankenstein!!, or something like it, every year, until the audiences get over their hangups. Then we could better appreciate cool things, like how Gruber always used slide whistles when the lyrics were about flying.
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Date: 2006-05-14 02:49 pm (UTC)Yes, I meant the music. I just didn't think it had that much intellectual or emotional heft to it, and I expect that Frankenstein!! has earned its success more as a novelty piece than as a serious addition to the repertoire.
The "transgressive" acts are certainly a large part of that, and one might say that they're distracting, that Gruber should have left them out so that the subtler and more interesting things, such as you note, could come through.
But I think he did this deliberately, to give the work a generally transgressive frame, without which it might be harder to catch on to the grotesquery in the music that is to match the lyrics.
If there's a flaw, it's that the non-traditional things the musicians do just occasionally pop up out of nowhere (sometimes literally) and aren't integrated into the piece the way they are in something like George Crumb's Echoes of Time and the River, with its whispering and notated walking around.
But there's a huge difference which works in Gruber's favor. Both works cause audience laughter. But Gruber wants the audience to be amused in this manner. Crumb doesn't.