concert review: Symphony Silicon Valley
May. 13th, 2006 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacLast concert of the season. It started out promising: crisp, colorful Debussy Petit Suite, followed by something unusual: Astor Piazzolla's Cuatro Estaciones porteñas (Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) arranged and to some degree recomposed (a no-no in classical music, but then Piazzolla wasn't really a classical composer) by Leonid Desyatnikov into a concerto for solo violin (Ju-Young Baek, in very good form) and small string orchestra, to which the arranger added - this wasn't Piazzolla's idea - sly little references to Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Pachelbel's Canon, Bach's Air on the G String ...
Before the second half, Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, I said a small prayer. Please be a good performance, I said. I know that too much of this season has been lackluster; I want something I can really praise to top off the big article for SFCV I'm writing on them that's due next week. Please?
And the good conductor Paul Polivnick and the musicians answered my prayer. A bit rough (strings, get together on those accelerandi), but the important part was that the orchestra breathed the music. The first movement was excellent, the second superb, the third sublime. After that it couldn't get any better, but the best moments were at the start of the finale, as the strings' opening shimmer came out of nowhere, and the reaction to the first appearance of the distorted idée fixe came off as genuine panic, not as an exaggerated double-take. In the big slow-movement solo for English horn, oboeinsight wasn't technically flawless, but gave a rich and fluid sound without pathos. But we don't ask this orchestra to be technically flawless, we ask it for the liveliness that a good second-tier orchestra can give better than the world-class guys.
This was the best performance SSV has given since its immortal Sibelius Second of four years ago, and it was good in much the same way: take a work with almost intractable structural problems and make them vanish. The Symphonie fantastique tends to be wayward, erratic, stop-and-start, a bit juryrigged. Not this time. Polivnick carefully blocked out each individual section, and he got the orchestra to do its best. It proves again that SSV can shine under the right conductor, and Polivnick, like Flynn and Shinozaki before him, is the right conductor.
Before the second half, Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique, I said a small prayer. Please be a good performance, I said. I know that too much of this season has been lackluster; I want something I can really praise to top off the big article for SFCV I'm writing on them that's due next week. Please?
And the good conductor Paul Polivnick and the musicians answered my prayer. A bit rough (strings, get together on those accelerandi), but the important part was that the orchestra breathed the music. The first movement was excellent, the second superb, the third sublime. After that it couldn't get any better, but the best moments were at the start of the finale, as the strings' opening shimmer came out of nowhere, and the reaction to the first appearance of the distorted idée fixe came off as genuine panic, not as an exaggerated double-take. In the big slow-movement solo for English horn, oboeinsight wasn't technically flawless, but gave a rich and fluid sound without pathos. But we don't ask this orchestra to be technically flawless, we ask it for the liveliness that a good second-tier orchestra can give better than the world-class guys.
This was the best performance SSV has given since its immortal Sibelius Second of four years ago, and it was good in much the same way: take a work with almost intractable structural problems and make them vanish. The Symphonie fantastique tends to be wayward, erratic, stop-and-start, a bit juryrigged. Not this time. Polivnick carefully blocked out each individual section, and he got the orchestra to do its best. It proves again that SSV can shine under the right conductor, and Polivnick, like Flynn and Shinozaki before him, is the right conductor.
