concert review: San Francisco Symphony

[calimac]

Wednesday was rather a disgruntled day, in which not much got done. So I wasn't in a proper mood to appreciate the evening's concert. David Zinman, who looks more like a 70-year-old libertarian science fiction writer than a 70-year-old conductor, led a program of miscellaneous 20th-century works.

Aaron Copland assembled his Music for Movies as a suite from miscellaneous chunks of movie scores he'd written in the late 30s. Pleasant enough pieces of Copland wallpaper, mostly not really worth preserving in this form.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote his Violin Concerto in 1945 using themes (but, thankfully, not the original orchestrations) from several of his 1930s film scores. Most of these are the long, chromatic, impassioned but shapeless kind of themes favored by film composers in those days. I'm not fond of violin concertos anyway, and this one ended soon enough for me. Hilary Hahn played the solo part with full power and assurance, though, belying her waiflike appearance. And for an encore, she remembered that other composers besides Bach have written for unaccompanied violin, and played us a charming little slow movement by Ysäye, a composer quite undervalued these days.

Anders Hillborg's 1994 Liquid Marble is ten minutes of what my friend DGK calls Soundscape. Technically it's largely a series of held dissonant chords (lots of minor seconds) in hairpin crescendo/decrescendos, beginning and cutting off sharply. The aural effect on me was to summon up an intense image of huge shimmering things like sheets of shining plastic shooting past me at high speed in outer space. And that is an appropriate image, for this is Son-of-Ligeti music (Hillborg in fact studied with a guy who studied with Ligeti) and Ligeti, of course, is the man whose work accompanied the spectral-light-show scenes in 2001.

Finally, the suite from kip_w's favorite, Háry János by Zoltán Kodály, perked me up. Yes, there was a cimbalom. (The composer authorizes a harpsichord as substitute if you don't have one, but SFSS has one.) I don't think there's any work in the standard symphonic repertoire, even Janáček's Sinfonietta, that's quite so fearless in making use of brass and percussion. (For the record: four horns, three trumpets, three cornets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, snare drum, long drum with snares, clash cymbals, suspended cymbal, triangle, bass drum, carillon, chimes, tam-tam, xylophone, celesta, piano.)

Thoughts on arriving, walking there and back, and departing:
1) Why has my secret stash of parking spaces been completely filled up the last couple of visits? Is it Christmas season, or that the Conservatory of Music has moved to the neighborhood?
2) I never have passengers with me to appreciate my really dazzling feats of parallel parking.
3) Even wearing a Santa hat, a panhandler is unlikely to get much change from passersby if he keeps yelling at them.
4) The ticket-takers at Davies no longer tear your ticket. They just look at it and hand it back whole. I wonder why that is, but I'm not going to ask.
5) A man dancing with a five-foot-tall electronic waving Santa statue in the foyer of a bar on Hayes Street is not too weird, even for San Francisco.
6) I should remember more often that Octavia Street leads straight to the freeway since they rebuilt it.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked the Kodaly. I lucked onto an LP of longer excerpts from that, and liked those so much I eventually found the whole opera, and it's musical comfort food for me. The "Toborszo" (sic?) recruiting song is pretty hot, too. I guess "Carmina Burana" is more in the vocal repertoire? I know it has lotsa percussion going on.

I always liked a solo Ysaye movement on an LP of short pieces Eugene Fodor recorded back in the 70s. I was playing the tape once while we were building sets for "Man of La Mancha," and some of the ladies in the cast started howling while it played. Philistines. I have since picked up a bit more of his stuff, largely thanks to an album of solo violin works by Vengerov.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Carmina Burana is no slouch in the brass-and-percussion department. But it doesn't match Hary Janos for singular emphasis.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

If you parallel parked near Symphony Hall in San Francisco, of course it's a dazzling feat. Consider it appreciated from afar.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the answer for #4 is they have bar codes now.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They do? Well, uh, I see the tickets do. But I didn't see the takers scan it.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Maybe they want to leave it in mint condition for collectors!