concert review: San Francisco Symphony
Oct. 6th, 2006 02:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI always try to attend when retired music director Herbert Blomstedt returns for a visit. I like his cool but intense conducting style, and I like his choice of programs.
First, a fairly classical rendition (with a reduced orchestra) of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, a work which gives the soloist more long beautiful themes than flashy passagework. Joshua Bell in the hot spot, looking as if he might casually wander off stage before his first entrance, was lyric enough but made up for any lack by sawing away vigorously at his own cadenzas, complex variations on the themes.
After intermission, Nielsen's Fifth Symphony, his most anguished and nearly his most cryptic. This work can sound cramped, as if it were locked in a box and unsuccessfully trying to escape, but not this time. Blomstedt's problem used to be maintaining to the end the energy he'd start off a piece with. Not any more: even the final blaze in E-Flat, intended as the first sunny music in the entire work, came across so harsh and questing that the audience wasn't sure the work was over.
A concert worth the time, even though it's made me even later at other things ...
First, a fairly classical rendition (with a reduced orchestra) of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, a work which gives the soloist more long beautiful themes than flashy passagework. Joshua Bell in the hot spot, looking as if he might casually wander off stage before his first entrance, was lyric enough but made up for any lack by sawing away vigorously at his own cadenzas, complex variations on the themes.
After intermission, Nielsen's Fifth Symphony, his most anguished and nearly his most cryptic. This work can sound cramped, as if it were locked in a box and unsuccessfully trying to escape, but not this time. Blomstedt's problem used to be maintaining to the end the energy he'd start off a piece with. Not any more: even the final blaze in E-Flat, intended as the first sunny music in the entire work, came across so harsh and questing that the audience wasn't sure the work was over.
A concert worth the time, even though it's made me even later at other things ...
