Conductor Jaap van Zweden (from his San Francisco Symphony event page)
Last night in Davies Symphony Hall this month of conductors visiting the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) began with the return of Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden. When van Zweden made his SFS debut in February of 2014, he was Music Director of the Dallas Symphony; but this season marks the beginning of his tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. While I have not be tracking the repertoire he has brought to the Philharmonic for his first season, here on this coast he clearly wanted to make an impression through his command of radically different styles.
His program consisted of only two compositions. SFS Principal Clarinet Carey Bell was concerto soloist in the first half, playing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 622 concerto in A major. The intermission was then followed by Anton Bruckner’s fifth symphony in B-flat major, making “something completely different” far more than a Monty Python cliché. What was most important was how van Zweden clearly knew well how to focus his attention in each of these two works that were practically diametrically opposing.
Handling the instrumental resources for K. 622 is no easy matter. We have come to take it for granted that Mozart performances by SFS draw upon a reduced string section. However, when it comes to balance, the clarinet is a tricky instrument. Each of its registers has its own distinctive sonority, but all of them have the ability to cut through even the thickest of instrumental textures as easily as a warm knife cuts through butter. It goes without saying that Bell is impeccably skilled at endowing each of those sonorities with richly expressive execution. The key question, however, is whether the accompanying ensemble can hold up against an instrument that is undeniably assertive, even when playing pianissimo.
Last night it seemed as if van Zweden needed a bit of time to find just the right way to bring that reduced string section into balance. Early in the first movement, when Bell was blithely working his way through a well-polished account of a diverse palette of accompanying textures, the strings had a bit of difficulty making it clear that they were the one’s carrying the principal theme. However, by the time that movement concluded, the relationship between soloist and ensemble was more clearly oriented around the relationship between melody and accompaniment; and that established agreement pervaded the remaining two movements of the concerto.
Balance was also an issue in the Bruckner symphony, presented last night using the score edited by Robert Haas. In this case, however, the matter is one of dynamics. While working with relatively modest resources (pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, and strings), the dynamic levels run the full gamut from barely audible to absolutely thundering. Furthermore, Bruckner is often inclined to shift rapidly from one extreme to another, often spending almost no time in the “middle ground.”
Van Zweden was clearly attentive to this rather idiosyncratic approach to loudness, but he was just as clearly determined to let Bruckner be Bruckner. Sadly, the audience was not as attentive. Back in 2006 when I was just beginning to exercise my writing chops, I wrote about “The Unbearable Being of Silence” in an audience that shattered the intense quietude of a piece by Toru Takemitsu with just about any means of breaking the silence, whether it involved coughing, sneezing, shifting weight in a squeaky chair, or rustling the program. The opening measures of Bruckner’s fifth are, admittedly, on the threshold of audibility; but, thanks of audience behavior, one only knew that the performance had begun by watching the cellists playing pizzicato.
Needless to say, things settled down the first time Bruckner’s pendulum took a swing into the fortissimo region. By then, however, the rhetorical significance of his approach to contrast has been seriously damaged. This was a great pity, since van Zweden clearly knew how to negotiate Bruckner’s extreme turns, whether they involved dynamics, instrumental resources, or, in a few cases, tempo. This was a reading that made a solid case to lure those who had their doubts about Bruckner into territory that, while clearly different from the territories of composers like Johannes Brahms or Gustav Mahler, had a distinctively compelling approach to logic, grammar, and rhetoric. All that was necessary was for the audience to sit still and pay attention; and, once listeners were willing to adjust to some of the more confounding qualities of the opening measures, it seemed as if they were gradually buying into what Bruckner was offering and how van Zweden was offering it.
Bruckner needs more advocates as compelling as van Zweden, and let us hope that more of them will bring their informed understanding to Davies in the near future.
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