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concert review: San Francisco Symphony
I'm just home from this, so this review is really hot off the presses.
Vladimir Ashkenazy is known to record collectors as "the Great Humming Conductor," for the audible additions he makes to the symphonic repertoire. But if he was humming on stage tonight, what can be heard by a microphone directly over the podium is not heard from a seat in the side balcony. Instead what gets you is the physical image. Ashkenazy, a short, white-haired man with a peppy demeanor belying his age (nearly 70), has about the clearest, most straightforward beat I've ever seen in a top-ranked conductor. As an interpreter, he seems to be saying, "Let's get the tempo and dynamics and entrances and exits down, and let the intangibles take care of themselves." In some repertoire this would be deflating, but tonight's pieces seemed to hold up fairly well.
After 95 years of existence, and uncounted thousands of Tchaikovsky performances, the SFS had never played his Third Symphony before. Ashkenazy was out to make you ask, "Well, why the hell not? This is good!" Certainly the first movement, fast and peppy like its director, was superb, and he wiggled with excitement when it was over. The scherzo, fourth of the five movements, was powerful rather than airy, and that applied across the board. The winds were in beautiful shape, and the chief hornist, who I guess was acting principal Robert Ward, gets the golden throat award for the evening.
Unfortunately for Tchaikovsky, the finale is much more slack and rambling in construction than the first movement, and didn't make as much of an impact under Ashkenazy's interpretation. But I think the audience remembered the opening.
Also on the program, my all-time favorite piano concerto, Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The pianist, a Macedonian by the name of Simon Trpčeski (Vanna, may I buy a vowel?), was well matched to the conductor, being a straightforward banger in the tradition of Rachmaninoff himself.
The opener was the US premiere of The Kingdom of Silence by Victoria Borisova-Ollas, a 36-year-old Russian expatriate living in Sweden. I first came across her in the 1998 Masterprize competition. Her work for that resembled John Adams in twittering mode. But if the current piece is like the work of an older composer, that composer is undoubtably Giya Kancheli. It opens with tiny celesta motifs in NBC-chimes style (Kancheli, undoubtably by happenstance, once actually did use the NBC chimes in a similar situation), over tiny hushed pillows of strings, each one closed off by Ashkenazy, hunched over the podium to indicate pianissimo, making a fist with his left hand.
Later on come loud outcries and chaos, not quite as sudden as Kancheli's but having the same effect, which is that by the time the opening music returns at the end, you feel as if you've been on a journey to get there. VBO has some trouble with orchestral balance in the louder parts - according to the notes there's supposed to be a soulful Sibelian english horn melody of which only a few notes were audible - a sad contrast with Tchaikovsky's utterly transparent scoring in which every voice can be heard even in the loudest fortes. But her hand with the quiet music was so exquisite the piece was worth hearing for that alone.
Vladimir Ashkenazy is known to record collectors as "the Great Humming Conductor," for the audible additions he makes to the symphonic repertoire. But if he was humming on stage tonight, what can be heard by a microphone directly over the podium is not heard from a seat in the side balcony. Instead what gets you is the physical image. Ashkenazy, a short, white-haired man with a peppy demeanor belying his age (nearly 70), has about the clearest, most straightforward beat I've ever seen in a top-ranked conductor. As an interpreter, he seems to be saying, "Let's get the tempo and dynamics and entrances and exits down, and let the intangibles take care of themselves." In some repertoire this would be deflating, but tonight's pieces seemed to hold up fairly well.
After 95 years of existence, and uncounted thousands of Tchaikovsky performances, the SFS had never played his Third Symphony before. Ashkenazy was out to make you ask, "Well, why the hell not? This is good!" Certainly the first movement, fast and peppy like its director, was superb, and he wiggled with excitement when it was over. The scherzo, fourth of the five movements, was powerful rather than airy, and that applied across the board. The winds were in beautiful shape, and the chief hornist, who I guess was acting principal Robert Ward, gets the golden throat award for the evening.
Unfortunately for Tchaikovsky, the finale is much more slack and rambling in construction than the first movement, and didn't make as much of an impact under Ashkenazy's interpretation. But I think the audience remembered the opening.
Also on the program, my all-time favorite piano concerto, Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The pianist, a Macedonian by the name of Simon Trpčeski (Vanna, may I buy a vowel?), was well matched to the conductor, being a straightforward banger in the tradition of Rachmaninoff himself.
The opener was the US premiere of The Kingdom of Silence by Victoria Borisova-Ollas, a 36-year-old Russian expatriate living in Sweden. I first came across her in the 1998 Masterprize competition. Her work for that resembled John Adams in twittering mode. But if the current piece is like the work of an older composer, that composer is undoubtably Giya Kancheli. It opens with tiny celesta motifs in NBC-chimes style (Kancheli, undoubtably by happenstance, once actually did use the NBC chimes in a similar situation), over tiny hushed pillows of strings, each one closed off by Ashkenazy, hunched over the podium to indicate pianissimo, making a fist with his left hand.
Later on come loud outcries and chaos, not quite as sudden as Kancheli's but having the same effect, which is that by the time the opening music returns at the end, you feel as if you've been on a journey to get there. VBO has some trouble with orchestral balance in the louder parts - according to the notes there's supposed to be a soulful Sibelian english horn melody of which only a few notes were audible - a sad contrast with Tchaikovsky's utterly transparent scoring in which every voice can be heard even in the loudest fortes. But her hand with the quiet music was so exquisite the piece was worth hearing for that alone.
no subject
I've never thought about that before, but I see what you mean. Over the years I've assumed that my recognizing different parts during an orchestral piece was due to my having rehearsed and played the piece with our (pretty darn good, thanks) high school orchestra. But sometimes the composer means for it all to blend together, yes?
no subject
One is blended scoring, where the composer intends to make the orchestra sound pretty much as if it's one entity. Typically German. Bruckner (an organist by profession) could make an orchestra sound more like one giant pipe organ than anybody else could.
The other is scoring in which each instrument can be heard individually. Typically French or Russian. Tchaikovsky was the master of this.
Most composers are somewhere in between.
The third type is muddy scoring where the listener can't make out what's going on.