Winds Rule in SFS Chamber Music Program

Yuhsin Galaxy Su with her clarinet (from her Meet the Musicians Web page)

With the exception of the first offering on the program, this afternoon’s chamber music performance in Davies Symphony Hall was devoted to wind instruments with a bias in favor of the clarinet family. Yuhsin Galaxy Su played clarinet in two quintets, both composed in the first half of the twentieth century. The earlier of these was the second work on the program, Carl Nielsen’s “Serenata in vano,” for which she was joined by bassoonist Joshua Elmore, Jesse Clevenger on horn, cellist Anne Richardson, and Daniel G. Smith on bass. This was followed by another quintet, Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 39 in G minor, with the other four performers being James Button on oboe, violinist Florin Parvulescu, Katarzyna Bryla on viola, and bassist Bowen Ha. Su also performed in a trio of basset horns, joined by Matthew Griffith and Jerome Simas in a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K.Anh. 229 divertimento in the key of B-flat major. The program began with a string quartet arrangement of two of the movements from Harry T. Burleigh’s Plantation Melodies Old and New. The quartet members were violinists Kelly Leon-Pearce and John Chisholm, Gina Cooper on viola, and cellist Barbara Bogatin.

As usual, the program was as engaging as it was diverse. The Burleigh arrangement was particularly noticeable in allowing each of the four quartet players to contribute to the theme. In the second of the two movements of An Ante-Bellum Sermon, that theme was “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” bringing a new perspective on a familiar spiritual. Particularly engaging, however, was Su’s capacity to address the eighteenth century with as much spirit as the twentieth. Clearly, she could fit into the ensemble of three basset horns as comfortably as a wind quintet.

That said, I found it particularly satisfying that the program concluded with the basset horn trio. Each of the four works on the program took its own unique approach to instrumental sonorities; but, even though it was the earliest work on the program, the Mozart divertimento came across as a real eyebrow-raiser! It made me appreciate that the SFS musicians knew better than to stick with the usual string quartet and wind quintet combinations. Clearly, this series is as adventurous in exploring sonorities as it is in presenting a diverse perspective of chamber music instrumentation.

Simon Rattle in Berlin: What Remains

Poster for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (from Wikipedia, provided by DreamWorks Pictures, complies with Wikipedia non-free content policy and fair use under United States copyright law)

This final account of the anthology of recordings made by Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic may best be described as “odds and ends from the twentieth century.” That would account for all but one of the remaining CDs, since there is one “outlier,” which is the original soundtrack from the 2008 film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I must confess that I did not know that this movie existed, even though its cast included Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, and Ben Whishaw.

Not long before I began my freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a friend loaned me a couple of soundtrack albums based on films by Federico Fellini. This was a whole new genre for me; and, during my freshman year, I spent many happy hours at the Brattle Theatre catching up on Fellini’s films. The composer for those films was Nino Rota, who would eventually establish a name for himself on his own, particularly in opera.

The score for Perfume, on the other hand, was a joint effort by Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, and Reinhold Heil, all performing on electronic gear. The Berlin Philharmonic is joined by the State Choir of Latvia along with three vocal soloists, sopranos Chen Reiss and Melanie Mitrano, and boy soprano Victor de Maizière. As is often the case for a product conceived by a committee, the music really does not hold up very well on its own (and, for that matter, the film did not do very well, particularly in the United States). Nevertheless, it was included in the anthology for the sake of completeness!

Where my own listening was concerned, the remaining selections all triggered different pangs of nostalgia. The most satisfying was Richard Strauss’ Opus 60, the suite of incidental music he composed for a performance of the Molière comédie-ballet, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Jean-Baptiste Lully composed the music for Molière, but Strauss composed music for Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of the play. His version plays up many of the eccentricities of the title character, making for an engaging listening experience. Unfortunately, on this CD, Opus 60 is preceded by Opus 40, the “Ein Heldenleben” tone poem, whose “protagonist” is even more laughable than Molière’s creation!

To some extent the revival of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana cantata also comes across as more than a bit laughable, half a century after it was all the rage. (Actually, it was already a butt of jokes when it showed up on television in the soundtrack for a cigar commercial.) Nevertheless, I have to say that I enjoyed the personalities evoked in the vocal solos by baritone Christian Gerhaher, tenor Lawrence Brownlee, and soprano Sally Matthews.

An entire CD is devoted to Carl Nielsen with Rattle conducting two of his concertos. The first of these is the flute concerto with Emmanuel Pahud as soloist. This is followed by Sabine Meyer taking the solo part in the clarinet concerto. The remainder of the album is the wind quintet with Pahud and Meyer joined by bassoonist Stefan Schweigert, Jonathan Kelly alternating between oboe and cor anglais, and Radek Baborák on French horn. While Nielsen’s music is no longer the “great discovery” it was during the second half of the last century, I have to confess that revisiting all three of these compositions was an enjoyable experience.

On the other hand, I am not quite sure what to make of Rattle’s decision to add Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” following the last two movements of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony. I suppose the conductor decided that, in the interest of filling out the CD, one good Adagio deserves another. Where my own listening was concerned, however, there was just too much cognitive dissonance!

Lindberg’s New Concerto for Yuja Wang

Composer Magnus Lindberg (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the San Francisco Symphony in the world premiere performance of Magnus Lindberg’s third piano concerto. The soloist was Yuja Wang, and the concerto was composed with her prodigious capacity for technique in mind. However, Lindberg also takes great delight in writing music for very large ensembles; and last night was definitely an “all-hands on deck” offering, drawing on the full resources of strings, winds, and brass with more instruments in the percussion section than can be enumerated.

Over the course of Wang’s many performances in Davies, she has cultivated the impression that she can play damn near anything. That was the impression that registered with Lindberg, and he was not shy about dialing the level of “anything” up to eleven. In the program notes James M. Keller found the mot juste in describing Lindberg’s composition as a “hyper-virtuoso concerto.” Not only were all ten fingers going across the entire keyboard with mind-boggling coordination, but also Wang never seemed to let up in her almost explosive expenditure of energy.

As impressive has this experience may have been, the “information level” (in Claude Shannon’s mathematical interpretation of that word) was so high across the full extent of resources that Salonen had to lead, that is it hard to imagine even the most attentive mind coming to grips with the full scope of the performance. Thus, any attempt at description that I can provide will most likely resemble that of a single blind man grasping one part of an elephant. While Keller’s account called attention to the rich chromaticism of Lindberg’s harmonies, I have to say that I was hard-pressed to get my head around any sense of harmonic progression. Indeed, my own focus of attention dismissed such progressions to the background, while I tried to “parse” Lindberg’s polyphony, which seemed to have more to do with rhythms than with pitch classes. Indeed, rhythm seemed to be the composer’s primary priority in an architecture that advanced through three noticeably distinctive movements.

One thing is certain: There is far too much “information” to be grasped during a “first contact” with this concerto. To continue with the Shannon analogy, mind cannot begin to find the patterns among the bits when it is still trying to sort out the “ones and zeros” of the bits themselves. This is music in which familiarity is a strong prerequisite for attentive listening; and familiarity demands more than one encounter with performance, no matter how compelling that performance may be. I look forward to an opportunity for my second encounter with this concerto, but only after all those memories currently rattling around in my head have had a chance to subside!

The program as a whole followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony format. Lindberg’s concerto was framed by two twentieth-century selections, both of which involved a similarly rich scope of sonorities. The overture was Carl Nielsen’s Opus 17 “Helios,” which basically “documents” the movements of the sun across the sky from the first signs of light at dawn to the settling into the darkness of dusk. This was the one composition that did not involve any percussion other than the timpani. However, there was no shortage of rich textures of instrumentation across both the winds and brass families.

Those familiar with Salonen’s recordings know that he accounted for all six of Nielsen’s symphonies with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra during his tenure as a Sony artist. These tracks were interleaved with shorter works, one of which was “Helios,” included on the album with the fourth (“Inextinguishable”) symphony. Nevertheless, there are subtleties in Nielsen’s palette of sonorities that can only really be appreciated through “physical presence,” rather than even the best recording technologies. Salonen had full command of that “physical presence” in last night’s account of “Helios,” whetting the appetite for further samples from the Nielsen canon.

That particular Sony album was first released in 1986. Ten years later, Salonen recorded performances of the “Concerto for Orchestra” and “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta” by Béla Bartók with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last night he returned to “Concerto for Orchestra” for the “symphony” portion of the program, following the intermission. I came to know this music through the RCA album of Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and there was a time when I would play that album to death. However, here, too, there are far more subtleties in the blends of instrumental sonorities than can be registered through recording technology.

Unless I am mistaken, last night was my first “physical” encounter with the Bartók “Concerto;” and each of the five movements confronted me with experiences that had never registered when listening to recordings. This was not just a matter of sonorities. Salonen had clearly made many strategic decisions in the physical disposition of the instrumentalists. Listening was not just a matter of the overall blend. Rather it involved the many ways in which the different instruments would play off each other.

This is particularly evident in the playful approach taken in the second movement. This explores the sonorities of five different instruments: bassoon, oboe, clarinet, flute, and muted trumpet. Each sonority is established by a pair of instruments separated by a different pitch interval as follows:

1. bassoons: minor sixth
2. oboes: minor third
3. clarinet: minor seventh
4. flute: perfect fifth
5. trumpet: major second

These “couples” are accompanied by the string section, along with a solo side drum (played last night by Jacob Nissly). After each of the pairs has had its say, there is a brass choir interlude, after which each pair returns with a more embellished account with increased instrumentation.

Taken as a whole, Salonen’s accounts of both Nielsen and Bartók made a convincing case that listening in the concert hall will always be a richer experience than listening to a recording!

Salonen Brings Early Nielsen to SFSymphony+

This morning the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) released its second video of the year for on-demand streaming through the SFSymphony+ Web site. Readers may recall that last month’s release, LIGETI: PARADIGMS was an ambitious production in which the music itself was supplemented by highly creative video techniques, some of which depended on imaginatively-designed software technology. The result was a 40-minute experience of three of Ligeti’s compositions that may have left some viewers concerned about sensory overload.

Today’s release was decidedly more modest in nature. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen led an ensemble of fourteen string players: six violinists (probably divided evenly into firsts and seconds), three violas, four cellos, and one bass. These were the resources for a performance of Carl Nielsen’s Opus 1, a suite for string orchestra often known as the “little” suite.

That adjective is definitely “on the money.” The suite consists of three movements, each one somewhat longer than its predecessor. The movements are identified only by genre: “Präludium,” “Intermezzo,” and “Finale.”

The score itself is an impressive one, particularly when one takes into account that the composer was 22 years old when it was completed. Mind you, all of the richly interleaved polyphony that the listener encounters in this suite may have been the deliberate effort of a young composer seeking out just the right moves to attract attention. In that context the suite benefits from Salonen’s non-nonsense approach to conducting the score, bringing clarity to all of that polyphony without conveying the impression that the composer was merely preening.

screen shot from the video being discussed

My own guideline for assessing polyphonic composition for strings involves the amount of attention allotted to the violas. The three violists were led by Assistant Principal Katie Kadarauch (in the above screen shot). By way of disclaimer, I should note that I have had a soft spot for her after I experienced a solo recital she presented for San Francisco Performances at the Hotel Rex. Nevertheless, in this case, she was very much the leader of the three violas with several generous expressive passages, providing just the right balance among those playing violin, cello, and bass.

Most important is that Salonen established a straightforward delivery of Nielsen’s score, which I found highly preferable to all of that technology that did little more than get in the way during the Ligeti performances.

Blomstedt Returns with Two Intense Symphonies

SFS Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt (photograph by Jürgen M. Pietsch, courtesy of SFS)

San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt last visited Davies Symphony Hall roughly a month before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. On that occasion he presented a two-symphony program. The first half of his program was devoted entirely to the first symphony in G minor by Swedish composer Franz Berwald. The second half turned to the Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major by Johannes Brahms.

Last night, almost exactly two years later, Blomstedt returned to the SFS podium with another “symphony coupling” following a similar pattern. This time the first half of the program was Danish, Carl Nielsen’s Opus 29 (fourth) symphony, known as “The Inextinguishable.” For the second half Blomstedt shifted from Brahms to Ludwig van Beethoven, presenting the Opus 67 (fifth) symphony in C minor. Blomstedt is now 94 years old, and his steps are visibly more measured than they used to be. However, when he raises his arms to conduct (without a baton), his body language is as expressive as ever.

The Nielsen symphony was somewhat of an unruly beast, beginning with the fact that the four movements unfold without interruption. Nevertheless, the overall structure is relatively easy to grasp, since sharp changes in instrumentation distinguish the second and third movements. (The second is devoted almost entirely to winds, while the third is marked by the return of the string section to take the lead.)

Those familiar with the Nielsen canon probably know that his Opus 50 (fifth) symphony is distinguished for having a cadenza for snare drum (perhaps the only symphony with this feature). Opus 29 is also attentive to composing for percussion, this time distinguishing the final movement with a fierce battle between two sets of timpani (allowing the instruments to be tuned to different sets of pitches). That sense of conflict reflected the fact that Nielsen created this symphony during World War I, which was subsequently viewed retrospectively through the Opus 50 snare drums.

Since the four movements are woven together in a seamless entirety, the listener almost never gets a chance to catch his/her/their breadth as those movements unfold. Blomstedt knows this symphony well, having recorded it with SFS in 1987 during his tenure as Music Director. His sense of overall flow guides the listener through the “inextinguishable intensity” that pervades the entire symphony. Last night that guidance was as sure as it had been in 1987, and the vigorous applause from the audience made it clear that Blomstedt had won over their attention from start to finish.

It would be the height of understatement to assert that Beethoven’s Opus 67 is more familiar to most audiences. One has to wonder how many of the seats in Davies were occupied by collectors of recordings that have played one or more of those albums of Opus 67 to death. As a result, it is likely that no one on audience side was expecting a “journey of discovery.”

Nevertheless, Blomstedt’s meticulous approaches to phrasing and instrumental balance made for a freshness of interpretation that one rarely (if ever) finds on a recording. Yes, it would be fair to say that most, if not all, of the audience “knew all the tunes.” However, every now and then, Blomstedt would tease out a new way of turning a phrase, almost as if he wanted to ask the audience, “Did you remember this one?”

His return to Davies could not have been more memorable.

Blomstedt to Return with Two-Symphony Program

Conductor Herbert Blomstedt (photograph by Martin Lengemann, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

San Francisco Symphony Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt last visited Davies Symphony Hall almost exactly two years ago. At that time there was no thought that concert programming as we knew it would be disrupted. Always stimulated by the conductor’s imaginative inventiveness, I described that performance as an “alternative ‘Three Bs’” concert. The familiar “B composer” was Johannes Brahms, represented by his Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major. That symphony was complemented by the first symphony in G minor composed by the “Swedish B,” Franz Berwald. The “third B” was Blomstedt himself!

At the beginning of next month, Blomstedt will make his first visit to the Davies podium since the onset of the pandemic. Once again he will present a two-symphony program, but only the second of the two will involve a “B” composer. The program will conclude with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 (fifth) symphony in C minor. The first half of the program will be devoted to Carl Nielsen’s Opus 29 (fourth) symphony. This symphony was not assigned a key. However, it was given a name: “The Inextinguishable.” Composed during World War I, Nielsen chose the name as a reference to (in his words) “the elemental will to live.”

This concert will be given three performances, at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 3, and Friday, February 4, and at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, February 6. A single Web page has been created with hyperlinks for purchasing tickets for each of those dates. Tickets are priced between $20 and $165. There will be an Inside Music talk, free to all concert ticket holders, given by Alexandria Amati one hour prior to each concert. Doors will open fifteen minutes before the talk begins.

These performances will be preceded by the next Katherine Hanrahan Open Rehearsal. This special behind-the-scenes experience begins at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, February 3, with coffee and complimentary doughnuts, followed by a half-hour introductory talk by Amati at 9 a.m. The rehearsal itself begins at 10 a.m.; and, of course, the pieces rehearsed are at the conductor’s discretion. General admission is $30 with $40 for reserved seats in the Premier Orchestra section, Rear Boxes and Side Boxes, and the Loge. Tickets may be purchased online through a separate event page.

Barbirolli at Hallé: Tchaikovsky and Dvořák

As I observed about a month ago, before undertaking a “broad view” of the CDs in Sir John Barbirolli: The Complete Warner Recordings devoted to performances by the Hallé Orchestra of nineteenth-century composers, I wanted to focus on two of the composers from the end of that century: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Antonín Dvořák. This may raise a few quizzical eyebrows, particularly in the context of Dvořák’s fruitful relationship with Johannes Brahms. Nevertheless, there are a few factors in favor of this grouping.

First of all there is the relative close proximity in age. Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, followed by Dvořák less than a year and a half later on September 8, 1841. More relevantly, both of these composers had strong nationalist streaks, inspired by traditional source music from Russia and Bohemia, respectively. Both had ties to the United States; and, while he is better known for the time he spent in Spillville, Iowa, Dvořák served as the Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City from 1892 to 1895. Tchaikovsky was associated with a more enduring New York institution, having been one of the two conductors to preside over opening night at Carnegie Hall on May 5, 1891, where Barbirolli himself would conduct only a few decades later. (The other conductor was the German-born American Walter Damrosch.) Less significantly, both Dvořák and Tchaikovsky tend to be best known for their last three symphonies.

The house in which Tchaikovsky composed his “Pathétique” symphony (photograph by Stoljaroff, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Those six symphonies make up the “bulk” of Barbirolli’s Hallé recordings of these two composers. The Tchaikovsky offerings are Opus 36 (fourth symphony) in F minor, Opus 64 (fifth symphony) in E minor, and Opus 74 (sixth “Pathétique” symphony) in B minor. There are also a few shorter selections, including the “Romeo and Juliet” “Overture-Fantasy,” the Opus 31 “Marche Slav,” and a string section performance of the “Andante cantabile” movement from the Opus 11 (first) string quartet in D major. I doubt that any readers need to be reminded that, with the possible exception of the string quartet movement, these are all highly emotionally-charged selections.

Fortunately, Barbirolli fully appreciated the dangers of out-Heroding Herod in conducting these compositions. (I suspect we all have our favorite examples of conductors that lacked such appreciation.) Since all of these selections were recorded for stereophonic releases, one can admire the technical fidelity to the wide dynamic range encountered in all of Tchaikovsky’s full-orchestral scores. What is important is that Barbirolli is more interested in the sharp contrasts across dynamic levels, rather than simply pushing those levels to extremes. Thus, for example,  when the first movement of Opus 36 involves a series of ascents to loud climaxes, Barbirolli knew how to realize the larger-scale ascent evolving as one climax leads to the next. As a result, these are recordings that capture the full expressiveness of Tchaikovsky’s music without ever devolving into a series of tantrums.

Under the current numbering conventions (as opposed to those in effect when the albums were first released), the Dvořák symphonies are Opus 70 (seventh) in D minor, Opus 88 (eighth) in G major, and Opus 95 (ninth, “From the New World”). Readers will probably notice that this includes the only one of the six symphonies in a major key, and Opus 88 definitely established the most positive rhetoric of the bunch. However, the minor mode is also represented by a recording of the Opus 44 wind serenade in D minor. This also makes a nice complement to the strings-only account of the “Andante cantabile” (which is the only Tchaikovsky selection in the major mode). The Dvořák offerings also include the Opus 66 “Scherzo capriccioso” and the orchestral versions of the fourth, sixth, and seventh pieces in the Opus 59 Legends collection.

Taken as a whole, Barbirolli can work with greater expressive breadth in conducting the Dvořák selections. However, as in his approaches to Tchaikovsky, he knows how to manage a dynamic contour over the full extent of a movement. This can even be appreciated in the Opus 44 serenade, in which the movements are relatively short and depend more on instrumental color than on dynamics. It is also worth noting that the recording of Opus 44 is coupled with music that is not by Dvořák, Charles Gounod’s “Petite Symphonie” in B-flat major. This results in a “side-by-side” presentation of how composers from two different generations (Gounod’s being the earlier) chose to work with writing for a wind ensemble.

More perplexing was the decision by Warner Classics to couple Tchaikovsky’s Opus 74 with Carl Nielsen’s Opus 29 (fourth “Inextinguishable”) symphony. This is the only recording of Nielsen’s music in the entire Warner collection; and my guess is that someone on the production team said, “Well, we have to put it somewhere.” In that context coupling the rhetorical intensity of that symphony with that of Tchaikovsky’s Opus 74 is probably as good a decision as any.

Nevertheless, because Barbirolli’s account of Nielsen is as perceptive and expressive as his recordings of Tchaikovsky, I find that I have a bone to pick with the business side of music history. The recording sessions for Opus 29 took place in September of 1959. This was a time when Nielsen was little known by anyone not living in Denmark, even though his Opus 50 (fifth) symphony had been performed at the 1950 Edinburgh Festival.

Then, in 1962, Leonard Bernstein brought Opus 50 to the New York Philharmonic concert series and made a recording for Columbia. The author of the Wikipedia page for that symphony asserts that the recording “helped Nielsen's music to achieve appreciation beyond his home country” (reinforced with three footnote citations). I remember when that recording was released, and it got more than healthy exposure through classical music radio stations. However, while it oriented me to how the symphony was structured, I was never particularly sold on the piece until I listened to Herbert Blomstedt conduct a performance with the San Francisco Symphony, which pretty much got any connection between Bernstein and Nielsen out of my system! In that context I would say that Barbirolli’s approach to Opus 29 was up there rubbing shoulders with Blomstedt, and the Columbia release had much more to do with balance sheets than about the qualities of the performance that was recorded.

Carl Nielsen’s Chamber Music for Violin

courtesy of Naxos of America

About a month ago Naxos released an album presenting the results of a major project to record the complete works for violin solo and violin and piano by Carl Nielsen. The project was realized through the efforts of Danish violinist Hasse Borup with joint support from the National Danish Academy of Music and the Royal Danish Library, as well as Naxos. Borup’s accompanist for this project was the American pianist Andrew Staupe. The “completeness” of the project is based on the catalogue of Nielsen’s works (CNW) compiled by the Royal Danish Library. The track listing provides the CNW numbers for all of the compositions, as well as the opus numbers for the published ones.

The major works on the album are the two published violin sonatas, CNW 63 in A major (Opus 9), composed in 1895, and CNW 64 with no key specification (Opus 35), composed in 1912 and revised in 1919. Both of these are three-movement sonatas with basically fast-slow-fast structures. Those familiar with Nielsen’s orchestral music will probably recognize some familiar chromatic tropes. CNW 63 predates all of the symphonies and concertos and may mark Nielsen’s initial pursuit of this particular style of chromaticism. However, by the time he began work on CNW 64, he had flexed his chromatic muscles, so to speak, on both the CNW 26 second symphony (“The Four Temperaments,” Opus 16) and the CNW 27 third (“Sinfonia espansiva,” Opus 27). Thus, there appears to be an interleaving of inventiveness between the orchestral works and those for violin (which was an instrument that Nielsen had played since his childhood).

The other major work is the CNW 46 (Opus 48) set of eight variations on a very short (a little over a minute) theme, which is preceded by a prelude, which is the longest section of the entire composition. According to the booklet notes by Niels Krabbe, this piece, composed for solo violin, was inspired by the Chaconne movement that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor. The inspiration clearly involved structure, since there are few, if any, traces of Bach in the thematic and embellishing content. Nevertheless, like the Bach source, the piece is definitely a reflection on the rhetorical impact of brief “source material.”

The album also includes three of Nielsen’s earliest compositions, all of which were composed when Nielsen became an army musician at the age of fourteen in 1881. These include two Romances (CNW 60 in G major and CNW 61 in D major) and a three-movement violin sonata (CNW 62 in G major). These date from a time when he became more familiar with the chamber music of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; and Krabbe’s notes include a quotation associating CNW 62 with “a scent of Mozartian youth.” Nevertheless, it is clear that Nielsen’s skill’s had advanced considerably by the time his music was being published. Thus, the mature violin sonatas and the CNW 46 variations provide the “meat and potatoes” of this album and will probably leave the strongest impressions on the attentive listener.

Intense Concerto and Symphony at SFS

Violin soloist Leila Josefowicz (from the event page for this week’s SFS concert)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, Music Director Designate Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the first of three performances of the second program he prepared for his visit to the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). This program followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony structure; but there was nothing usual about any of the offerings. Most important was the return of Salonen’s own music. Violin soloist Leila Josefowicz returned to perform again the violin concerto that Salonen had written for her in 2009, first performed in Davies on December 8, 2011, the date of the 100th anniversary of the very first SFS performance. (It should go without saying that Salonen was the conductor on that occasion.)

This is a concerto that pushes the very semantic foundations of “virtuoso” to the utmost limits. The symphony is structured in four movements, the first three of which are played without interruption (notwithstanding the notation on the program sheet suggesting that there are no interruptions between any of the movements). However, one could probably say that the concerto begins with a breakneck cadenza into which instruments in the orchestra insinuate themselves gradually, almost suggesting that they serve as a 21st-century take on a seventeenth-century continuo. Nevertheless, the orchestra does begin to establish its own identity, often in unexpected ways. (The use of a full array of pitched gongs is particularly chilling.)

The idea of a final movement detached from the preceding three has its own connotations. The movement is entitled “Adieu;” and it is easy to appreciate the rhetoric of leave-taking. However, it also recalls the fact that “Der Abschied” (the farewell), the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (the song of the earth), makes for a distinctive change from the five movements that preceded it. Indeed, it is only in “Adieu” that the violinist sheds an almost diabolical obsession with brutally demanding technique and settles into the most lyrical rhetoric of the entire concerto. As a conductor Salonen knew exactly how to enable this turn-on-a-dime shift in the overall tenor of the compositions; and Josefowicz confidently followed his lead into what amounted to an entirely new domain of expressiveness.

It goes without saying that this is decidedly not “sit back and listen” music. Future generations may find it to be the “comfortable old shoe” that we currently associate with, for example, Felix Mendelssohn’s Opus 64 violin concerto in E minor; but, most likely, none of us will be part of that audience. Nevertheless, Salonen’s concerto is definitely an edge-of-your-seat affair, particularly for attentive listeners; and we all deserve to get to know it better. Personally, I do not wish to wait another nine years before my next opportunity to listen to this music in performance.

Equally intense was Salonen’s performance of Carl Nielsen’s Opus 50 (fifth) symphony. This music has its own dark rhetoric; and, for all we know, Salonen’s rich experience in conducting Nielsen’s music may well have had at least an implicit impact on his approach to writing a violin concerto. Certainly, the idea of an overall architecture of two sections, which then break down into distinct episodes, is as significant to Nielsen’s Opus 50 as it was to (at least) the first sequences of movements in Salonen’s concerto.

Unlike the concerto, however, Nielsen’s symphony is a study in the interplay of a rich diversity of sonorities. The eye is as engaged in the ear in efforts to discern which sonorities are coming from where. Indeed, sonority even rises above thematic material: As the symphony progresses, one begins to appreciate how often previously-encountered themes (or motifs) return.

Nevertheless, for all of the explicit and implicit symmetries of structure, Opus 50 will probably be remembered as the only symphony to include virtuoso composition for the snare drum. This was music that allowed Percussion Principal Jacob Nissly to demonstrate just how strong his command of technique was. The first entry of the snare drum is relatively innocuous, suggesting little more than a routine military procession. However, during the Adagio non troppo that concludes the symphony’s first distinct section, the snare drum ventures into territory of its own with almost psychotic outbursts of riffs that totally abandon any sense of underlying rhythm. (Nissly played this provocative cadenza from the Terrace, while he played the first snare drum passage on the stage, but separated from the other percussion players.) I have listened to this symphony many times, both in Davies and on recordings; but Nissly’s account of that cadenza scared the daylights out of me. Following the cadenza, he took on a shoulder-mounted snare drum; and his “last word” could be heard off-stage and out of sight.

Thanks to the interests and efforts of Herbert Blomstedt, San Francisco has long been a city in which those wishing to listen to Nielsen’s music, particularly his symphonies, could be well satisfied. Now we have Salonen, who is bringing his own personal stamp to that repertoire. This is a distinctively new style with different approaches to managing that composer’s flood of thematic material. It cannot be compared with Blomstedt’s legacy. Suffice it to say that, under Blomstedt, serious listeners learned a lot about Nielsen’s ingenuity and subtleties. Now we have Salonen to show us that there are still new approaches to listening to Nielsen’s prodigious creativity.

Reader’s may recall that this program also merited Beethoven250 status, even if Ludwig van Beethoven was represented only by an overture. The overture was taken from Opus 117, the commemorative cantata entitled King Stephen. The cantata itself is seldom performed, but the orchestra has become a concert favorite. Salonen chose to highlight the contrasting differences in volume and instrumentation, taking a playful attitude of highlighting those contrasts through exaggeration. The result was a bit on the eccentric side. However, as one that continues to undermine the “scowling Beethoven” tradition, I have to say that Salonen seemed to be going for the belly-laughs; and, without compromising the score as Beethoven wrote it, he pulled off unanticipated rhetorical twists that allowed us to appreciate Beethoven’s capacity for amusement.

Symphony Parnassus to Open 30th Season

Cellist Alexander Hersh (courtesy of Symphony Parnassus)

In the Better-Late-Than-Never Department I just received word that the 30th anniversary season of Symphony Parnassus will get under way this coming Sunday afternoon. Continuing to organize programs around emerging talents, the program will feature the 26-year-old cellist Alexander Hersh, who is connected to San Francisco through his grandfather, Paul Hersh, who teaches both viola and piano at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Cellist Hersh will perform Ernest Bloch’s “Schelomo,” which the composer described as a “Hebraic rhapsody.” The name is the Hebrew form of “Solomon;” and the music was inspired by the pessimism of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament.

“Schelomo” will be the “concerto” offering in the conventional overture-concerto-symphony concert program. The overture will be taken from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 113, the incidental music he composed for a performance of the play The Ruins of Athens by August von Kotzebue. The symphony will be Carl Nielsen’s Opus 29 (fourth), which the composer named “The Inextinguishable.” This symphony was composed in 1916 during World War I; and it includes a “battle” between two sets of timpani. Symphony Parnassus will be conducted by Music Director Stephen Paulson.

The performance of this program will begin at 2 p.m. this Sunday, November 17, in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which is located at 50 Oak Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street and a short walk from the Van Ness Muni Station. Ticket prices will be $25 for general admission, $20 for seniors, and $10 for students and those under the age of 26 (with proof of identification). Online purchases are being handled by a Brown Paper Tickets event page.

Salonen’s Nordic “Preferences” on Sony

The final CD in the Sony Classical 61-CD box set of all of its recordings made by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is entitled A Nordic Festival. Salonen conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in what amounts to a survey of Nordic composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the tracks involve familiar composers: Edvard Grieg, Carl Nielsen, and Jean Sibelius. For my generation Hugo Alfvén is also a “known commodity,” if not by name than by the opening theme of his first Swedish rhapsody, entitled “Midsommarvaka” (midsummer vigil), music that seemed to be favored by producers of the early generations of children’s television programming. The remaining composers on the album are Armas Järnefelt and Jón Leifs, who may be familiar to only a handful of my readers (if that many).

Because these selections cut across the categories I formed to account for the rest of the collection, I decided that I would set aside a separate “Nordic preferences” category to account for the selections I had not yet discussed. These included albums devoted by Grieg, Nielsen, and Sibelius, as well as one for Lars-Erik Larsson and a rather enigmatic album devoted primarily to Anders Hillborg. Taken as a whole, this is a category that has its ups and downs; but, as far as my own personal tastes are concerned, the ups definitely outweigh the downs.

One reason that my tastes are impressed is that, within the sixteen CDs in this collection, the composer that receives the most attention is Nielsen. That amounts to all six of his symphonies and all three of his concertos, as well as an engaging assortment of additional works. Like many I had never even heard of Nielsen until Columbia released a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of his fifth symphony in 1962 with an album cover that declared the music to capture “the drama of Denmark.” Like many (most?) contemporaries, my personal knowledge of Denmark was pretty much limited to Victor Borge and his preference for comedy over drama. Nevertheless, I would guess that all of us making our “first contact” with Nielsen through that album were arrested by his inclusion of a cadenza for snare drum, if not by the overall impact of the symphony.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1995, an arrival that coincided with Michael Tilson Thomas succeeding Herbert Blomstedt as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) and Blomstedt’s assumption of the role of Conductor Emeritus. During his own tenure as Music Director, Blomstedt had championed Nielsen’s music, recording all six of the symphonies (along with a selection of shorter works) on four Decca CDs. In his Emeritus capacity he frequently returned to Nielsen’s music; and listening to his interpretation of the fifth symphony made it clear that there was far more to this music than its snare drum cadenza and that drama-of-Denmark marketing pitch.

As a result I have become more sensitive to identifying conductors interested in Nielsen and the approaches they take. Most recently Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic released recordings on the orchestra’s “house label” of all of the symphonies and concertos. As a result I felt well-prepared to address Salonen’s recordings, all of which were made with Swedish ensembles. My overall reaction is the wish that Salonen would visit SFS as frequently as Blomstedt and pay just as much attention to Nielsen. My hope is that listening to him conduct this repertoire in performance will have just as much impact as his recorded documents (and, hopefully, more so).

The Sibelius offerings in this category are far more modest. The only symphony included is the fifth (Opus 82 in E-flat major). After he composed his first three symphonies (which seem to have become favorites in concert programs), Sibelius began to “push the envelope” when it came to questions of how a symphony should be structured. The results tended to be both enigmatic and intense, and the fifth seems to have garnered the most attention. Salonen’s recording presents a sure-handed reading that does not try to smooth over any of the rough edges, making it as valuable an account of Sibelius as is encountered in his approaches to Nielsen.

Curiously, there are two recordings of the Opus 47 violin concerto in D minor. The earlier is with Cho-Liang Lin and the Philharmonia Orchestra, recorded in 1987; and the second is with Joshua Bell and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, recorded in 1999. The Lin recordings predate the recordings for Salonen’s album of violin concertos by Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, made with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1992. Taken together all of these recordings show a powerfully productive relationship between conductor and soloist that consistently hits the mark when the rhetorical expressiveness of the early twentieth century is at stake. The Bell recording, on the other hand, seems to be more about Bell than about a conductor-soloist partnership. (On the original cover for this album, Bell’s name is given a larger font than Salonen’s!) Fortunately, Lin is also the violinist for the recording of Nielsen’s concerto.

Album cover for Joshua Bell playing Sibelius (from Amazon.com)

The Grieg recording consists of excerpts from the Opus 23 music written for a production on Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt. That means that it offers a lot more than the two suites. However, if I want “more,” I would prefer going for “all,” which is what I have gotten for many years from the Unicorn-Kanchana two-CD release, which was the premiere recording of the full score. The Larsson album is devoted primarily to the suite God in Disguise with Swedish texts both sung and narrated. Since the box set does not come with a text sheet for this, there is little that I can say beyond observing that Larsson’s style tends to be moderately pleasant.

The one clunker in the collection is Jag vill se min älskade komma från det vilda (I want to see my beloved coming from the wild). This album is devoted almost entirely to the music of Anders Hillborg, one of Sweden’s most adventurous composers, whose influences include Brian Ferneyhough. Hillborg has a good relationship with Salonen; but, as a composer, he has been working freelance since 1982. That means he takes his revenue where he can get it, and the CD in this collection is devoted entirely to his work in the pop genre. As a result, if one wishes to talk about influences, it is probably the case that ABBA has far more to do with this album than Ferneyhough. My guess is that many listeners will find this particular album a refreshing change of pace from all of the other offerings in this box set, but I am not one of them!

Renewed Acquaintance with the Danish String Quartet

Towards the end of last month, the Danish String Quartet, consisting of violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who shared the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, made its San Francisco debut. They played in Herbst Theatre at a Shenson Chamber Series concert presented by San Francisco Performances (SFP); and I was delighted with the listening experience. What I had not realized at the time was that this was not my first encounter with the ensemble.

That “first contact” took place in the fall of 2013, when I had an opportunity to listen to a two-CD album of the complete string quartets (and one string quintet) of Carl Nielsen reissued by Dacapo. At that time Carl-Oscar Østerlind was the cellist. Otherwise, all the members then were the same as they are now, including the fact that the violinists alternated the leadership chair. This had also been my first contact with Nielsen’s chamber music for strings. My impressions were generally positive; but, apparently, they were not positive enough to leave a deep impression in memory.

At the Herbst recital Nielsen only appeared in the encore, a selection that was brief and not particularly representative. On the other hand a significant portion of the program was devoted to folk music from Nordic countries; and it was difficult to tell how much the musicians were playing from written-out arrangements and how much they were “jamming” over familiar themes. There was definitely a spontaneity that suggested the latter. However, because that sense of spontaneity also pervaded their readings of music by Ludwig van Beethoven and Béla Bartók, they could just as easily have been playing from notated score sheets.

courtesy of Universal Music

Fortunately, I have been able to revive the spirit of that portion of the program, thanks to the release this past September of Last Leaf by ECM New Series, the label with which the quartet now does all of its recording. In this case most of the tracks are identified as “traditional” with many modified by a specific nationality, such as “Danish” or “Swedish.” The track listing credits the ensemble with all arrangements; but that spirit of spontaneous “jamming” is again present. Furthermore, six of the sixteen tracks identify specific composers, suggesting that these may have been the notated arrangements, while the others could be played by ear. Regardless of the process behind the product, so to speak, listening to this music again on a recording turned out to be just as refreshing as listening to it in concert, perhaps even more so because much of the thematic material was more familiar. I also discovered that some of the concert selections, such as “Five Sheep, Four Goats,” came from an earlier ECM New Series album, Wood Works.

Further investigation revealed that the ensemble was also just as committed to living composers as they were to those of the recent and distant past. In May of 2016, ECM New Series released a recording of string quartets composed by Thomas Adès, Per Nørgård, and Hans Abrahamsen. Fortunately, I had experienced the Adès selection, “Arcadiana,” thanks to another SFP chamber music recital, which took place this past April. On that occasion it was played by the Calder Quartet (violinists Benjamin Jacobson and Andrew Bullock, violist Jonathan Moerschel, and cellist Eric Byers); and, having experienced “first contact,” I enjoyed the opportunity of getting to know the piece better.

On the other hand both Nørgård and Abrahamsen provided new “first contact” listening experiences. I was particularly struck by their capacity to achieve expressiveness through brevity (a capacity shared with “Arcadiana”). With so much satisfaction from such a modest round of listening experiences, I find that I now have eager curiosity to find out what other directions the Danish String Quartet has followed in order to build up their repertoire.

A Delightful Danish Debut

Last night in Herbst Theatre, the Danish String Quartet, consisting of violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, who shared the leadership chair, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, made its San Francisco debut. They performed in the second of the four concerts in this season’s Shenson Chamber Series presented annually by San Francisco Performances. The program was framed by two string quartets separated by almost exactly a century, each by a composer who made significant strides in advancing the genre. Between these two major “historical” offerings, they presented selections of folk music from Nordic countries, presumably in their own arrangements.

Those significant composers who spanned that aforementioned century were, of course, Ludwig van Beethoven and Béla Bartók. The program began with Bartók’s first (Opus 7) string quartet, which he completed in January of 1909. The second half was then devoted to the first (in F major) of the three Opus 59 quartets that the composer wrote in 1806 for the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Andreas Razumovsky. These are the sorts of selections that a string quartet invokes to establish its credentials, particularly when making a debut appearance. By the end of the evening there was no questioning that this was an ensemble with a solid command of both the technical and the expressive.

However, because of the overall structure of the program, Nørgaard introduced the evening by noting that all of the selections were rooted in folk traditions. Bartók made his first sketches for his quartet in 1907; but he did not complete it until after his field studies of folk melodies, which he conducted with his colleague Zoltán Kodály. Beethoven, on the other hand, appealed to Razumovsky’s nationality by inserting Russian themes into all three of the Opus 59 quartets.

In many ways Bartók’s experiences are more interesting in that one can almost draw a line at the point where the composer broke with nineteenth-century tradition in favor of the folk sources he had been collecting. Indeed, his decision to open with a fugue could easily be interpreted as a latter-day reflection on the fugues Beethoven wrote to begin two of his late quartets, Opus 131 in C-sharp minor and Opus 132 in A minor. However, by the time the quartet has advanced to its second movement, one can sense Bartók’s feelings that he had had enough of traditional forms. (Beethoven was similarly not that all pleased with such forms in both of those two quartets that begin with fugues.) By the time Bartók had begun his quartet’s final movement, he was well equipped to explore new territory; and the results of his field studies provided him with a compass for orientation.

Fortunately, the Danish String Quartet did not perform this music as if it were a history lesson. Nevertheless, one could say that their sensitivity to the composer’s technique provided an informed reflection of his mindset. Thus, the final movement was performed with what might be called a definitive sense of arrival, settling into a new rhetoric and enthusiastically exploring where that rhetoric might lead the underlying language of string quartet music.

This made for an excellent parallel with the F major Opus 59 quartet. Here, again, Beethoven does not introduce his “folk reference” until the final movement. Mind you, he was not about to sacrifice his long-standing commitment to formal architecture; but, at the same time, he used his Russian theme as orientation for exploring new approaches to rhetoric. In would be both unfair and inaccurate to say that the Danes performed their Beethoven as a parallel to their Bartók, but they performed both quartets in a way that drew attention to how each composer found his own way to explore a new domain.

Like many (most?) in the audience, I was unfamiliar with the folk sources presented between the Bartók and Beethoven selections. Nevertheless, there was a clear sense that the Quartet members were playing for the joy of making music (jamming?) together, rather than interpreting marks on score pages. If the music was unfamiliar, the spirit behind that music could still work its magic, bringing a personable atmosphere to a chamber music setting in which character tends to be more on the formal side. That spirit was also present through the encore selection of music by the only named Danish composer of the evening, Carl Nielsen. The selection was described as a song; but it had all the trappings of a Lutheran hymn in four voices, closing of an evening of impressive insights with a calm sense of quietude.

Soprano Deborah Voigt Returns to Davies with Visiting Danish Ensemble

This past September soprano Deborah Voigt became a full-time member of the Voice Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, but most of us living in the city would hardly know it on the basis of any public appearances. Last night, however, her loyal fans had an opportunity to listen to her thanks to the Great Performers Series of the San Francisco Symphony. The Danish National Symphony Orchestra is currently on tour, and last night Davies Symphony Hall hosted the first of the two concerts that Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi prepared with them. Last night’s program included Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, settings of five poems by Mathilde Wesendonck that he composed while he was working on his opera Tristan und Isolde.

Wagner wrote these songs between November of 1857 and May of 1858 for female voice and piano; and that is how they appear in the Schott Complete Edition of Wagner’s art songs (a relatively modest volume that runs to only 103 pages). Wagner himself reworked the last of the songs, “Träume” (dreams), for chamber orchestra, turning the vocal line into a violin part. The orchestral version performed last night was prepared by Wagner conductor Felix Mottl, probably during Wagner’s lifetime. (The notes for last night’s program book put the date “about 1880.”)

Some of Mottl’s ideas for orchestra may have come from the score for Tristan und Isolde. Wagner called both “Träume” and “Im Treibhaus” (in the greenhouse) “studies” for that opera. The results are most evident at the beginning of the third act, where extended passages were appropriate for the prelude. However, the calming triple metre of “Im Treibhaus,” had most of its rhythmic certainty expunged by the time the thematic material settled into the opera. If Mottl was inspired, even in part, by Tristan, then that would explain why the orchestral version tends to be far more compelling in its erotic connotations than Wagner’s original piano version.

On the other hand there is a good chance that Wagner wanted to keep any such connotations securely encrypted. Wesendonck was the wife of Otto Wesendonck, who gave Wagner sanctuary in Zürich when his political activism forced him to go on the run from Saxon authorities. Wagner and his wife Minna were living in a small cottage on the grounds of the Wesendonck estate. Wagner being Wagner, the general consensus is that he had an affair with Mathilde, which may even have been the inspiration for Tristan und Isolde. It is therefore understandable that the songs were first published under the “anonymized” title Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme (five poems for a female voice); and the Wesendonck name never appeared in the publication. The poet’s name was not revealed until after her death in 1902, but Mottl could still appreciate the eroticism of her texts without knowing explicitly who she was.

Last night that eroticism was given a rich account through both the intensity of Voigt’s vocal work and the urgency with which Luisi provided the instrumental accompaniment. So much of the score arises through a throbbing restlessness that frequently drives the music to cross stanza boundaries in a matter that propels the vocalist from one thought to the text. For the most part the dynamic level is kept firmly in check, indicating that, even when working on such a reduced scale, Wagner still had a keen sense of how to manage the significance of his climax points. As a result of his six-year tenure as Principal Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, Luisi has an equally keen sense of Wagner’s unique combination of logic and rhetoric; and that understanding led to an account by Voigt last night that was as memorable as any of her operatic appearances.

That same capacity to convey and manage urgency was just as apparent on a much broader scale during the second half of the evening with Luisi’s reading of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major. Since Luisi is comfortable with durations of Wagnerian proportions, he had no trouble with taking the repeat for the first movement exposition, turning that repetition into a deeper examination of the basic set of themes that had been introduced. That depth of examination then pervaded all four movements of the symphony, dealing with each in terms of its own unique rhetorical stance.

All of this was achieved, for the most part, through an impeccable sense of how to keep all the instrumental resources balanced. Particularly memorable was René Felix Mathiesen’s timpani work, which never failed Beethoven’s assertive rhetoric but never overwhelmed the rest of the ensemble. One could, admittedly, pick out weak spots in both rhythm and intonation arising occasionally from winds and brass. However, these were isolated events widely separated by the intense drive of the overall flow of Luisi’s interpretation. What mattered most was that he did what we should expect a conductor to do with the best-known repertoire: He found new points of view to take for music that we all thought we knew perfectly well from beginning to end.

Far less familiar was the overture selection for the program, Carl Nielsen’s Opus 17 concert overture, which he called “Helios.” The title is Greek for sun, and Nielsen wrote it while living in Greece in 1903. The work is basically a tone poem depicting the journey of the sun across the sky, beginning with the first hints of the dawn light, rising to the height of noon, and then returning to sink below the horizon of the sea. The sun itself is embodied in an assertive brass chorale, and the force of bright light emerges through the opposing rhetoric of a wild fugue. On the other hand, that initial sense of the presence of light easily recalled Wagner’s depiction of the origins of the Rhine at the beginning of his Das Rheingold opera. It is hard to imagine that Nielsen was not aware of Wagner’s devices, since they are shamelessly appropriated but then reworked by Nielsen’s own creative skills into an entirely new and throughly dazzling artifact. Furthermore, could there be a better way to introduce Wagner’s own music?

Just as shameless was Luisi’s choice of encore. This was “Jalousie ‘Tango Tzigane’” (jealousy gypsy tango), which has become one of the great warhorses of the pops repertoire. However, for all of its familiarity, it is probably the case that few know its origins. It was composed in 1925 by the Danish composer Jacob Gade, who led the 24-piece orchestra at the Palads Cinema in Copenhagen. In other words it was originally written as accompaniment for silent films.

Last night, of course, the encore was all about the music, beginning with a take-no-prisoners cadenza fearlessly delivered by Concertmaster Christina Aastrand. As might be guessed, both the cadenza and the music itself were presented with no shortage of tongue-in-cheek wit and vigor. Between Nielsen and Gade, last night was a delightful exposition of the breadth of Danish aesthetics at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A Commanding Sense of Sonority

When Nikolaj Znaider gave his San Francisco Performances debut violin recital last March, I was definitely one of the less enthusiastic members of the audience. The primary basis for my discontent was that, while Znaider had a strong command of metric pulse, he was not able to convert that pulse into an equally strong command of musical rhythm. By the time I heard this recital, I had already purchased my San Francisco Symphony tickets for the current season; and I knew I would be hearing him play the Johannes Brahms' 1878 Opus 77 D major violin concerto under Herbert Blomstedt. So I tried to conclude my impressions of the recital with the optimistic hope that Znaider would "play better with others."

According to Joshua Kosman's account of last Thursday afternoon's performance for the San Francisco Chronicle, Znaider is Blomstedt's protégé; and Blomstedt's presence on the podium definitely had a positive impact on Znaider. While I had found Znaider "a bit raggedy on the details" in his recital, in approaching the Opus 77, he converted these rough qualities into a raw and visceral confrontation with the intensely emotional composer of the Opus 60 C minor piano quartet, completed about three years before the concerto. This was not the usual lush display of technique soaring above a rich orchestral base; and the interpretation was such a departure from expectations that Kosman dismissed it as "rather dry and pedantic." However, anyone who knows enough about the Opus 60 to consider it as a point of departure for approaching Opus 77 will recognize that this performances was anything but "dry and pedantic;" and the validity of the approach was reinforced by the support that Blomstedt provided. By reducing the number of strings, Blomstedt provided an orchestral sound that was, indeed, dry; but it was a dryness endowed with a driving sense of urgency, which made the perfect match to Znaider's confrontational approach. Nevertheless, with all of these forays into Brahms' darker side, Blomstedt still delivered the wind chorale that opens the Adagio movement with a serenity that was as close to perfection as any performance of this work that I have heard. Nevertheless, that serenity signifies as the brief respite between the tensions of the outer movements; and, if this was not the Brahms we were used to hearing, it was certainly a side of Brahms that we could benefit from hearing.

By choosing Carl Nielsen's Opus 27 third symphony ("Sinfonia espansiva") for the second half of the program, Blomstedt demonstrated how a single symphony orchestra could easily shift from one domain of sonority to another, radically opposed to the first. The rich sounds he elicited from orchestra made it clear that all of the urgent dryness of the Brahms performance was an intentional and logical decision. Now we could return to a space more consistent with our expectations of a symphony orchestra, although there was now a different kind of urgent drive that propelled us through the four movements of this symphony.

This was clear from the very first impression, described in the program book by Michael Steinberg as "an amazing start with a series of violent and accelerating explosions, twenty-six of them, all on A." I am not sure I would call them "explosions." Indeed, I have to wonder whether or not Nielson might have been pushing back against the old fate-knocking-at-the-door cliché associated with Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 67 C minor symphony (the notorious fifth). This was the sort of panicked knocking at the door that rouses us from peaceful slumber and summons us to some task of utmost urgency; and the orchestra responded to that summons with an "expansive" burst of energy (consistent with the tempo given as Allegro espansivo). However, this movement is followed by an Andante pastorale, where all that expansive energy dissipates into an equally expansive pastoral stillness. Indeed, the stillness expands beyond the limits of the orchestra itself to include two wordless solo voices (soprano Katherine Whyte and baritone Eugene Chan), whom Blomstedt judiciously placed at the rear of the choir loft, literally above and beyond the space of the orchestra itself.

I have another quibble with Steinberg's notes where the final movement is concerned. He wrote that it "opens with a theme that marches along in what is all too easy to think of as a British war movie style of the 1940s or 50s." Perhaps I have just been thinking more about nationalism than Steinberg did when he wrote this text; but, to my ears, this theme was more of a chorale with a distinctive folk element displayed most prominently by an emphatic use of grace notes. Thinking back on the centrality of those grace notes, I was reminded of how Alban Berg had conceived of the final act of his opera Wozzeck as a sequence of variations movements, each developing variations on a non-conventional source, such as a rhythm or a single note. This opera followed Nielsen's symphony by a little less than ten years, but Berg had apparently not considered the idea of a variation on an embellishment! Nielsen's movement develops as each voice in the orchestral fabric gets its own crack at this folk idiom, concluding as all the voices come together in one final (expansive) rendering of the opening chorale.

I owe much of my understanding of Nielsen to Blomstedt. He recorded all of the symphonies with the San Francisco Symphony when he was Music Director. It has been a particular pleasure for me to have the opportunity to hear him return to these symphonies under his current Conductor Laureate status, and the Symphony certainly seems to be sharing that pleasure.

Giving Mozart his Due

It is almost exactly a year ago that I took San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman to task for a one-paragraph account of a performance of a Mozart piano concerto in the San Francisco Symphony season that ran the gamut from the dismissive to the vacuous. Last time the concerto was K. 482, the pianist was Emanuel Ax, and the conductor was Osmo Vänskä; and Kosman was clearly more interested in a Finnish conductor's approach to two Finnish composers, one familiar (Jean Sibelius) and one contemporary (Kalevi Aho). This time the "victim" was the earlier K. 456 B-flat major concerto, performed by Richard Goode under the baton of Alan Gilbert. As the recently appointed successor to Lorin Maazel in directing the New York Philharmonic, Gilbert has been attracting almost as much publicity as Gustavo Dudamel, who will soon be a permanent fixture at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Ironically, anyone who witnessed Dudamel bring the house down at Davies Symphony Hall with his interpretation of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird would probably be justified in asking, "Yes, but what can he do with Mozart?" In that respect Gilbert provided a broader palette of offerings to feed our prognostications, balancing the Mozart concerto with Carl Nielsen's second symphony (within five years of the "vintage" of the Sibelius symphony that Vänskä had conducted) and the first San Francisco Symphony performance of Steven Stucky's 1988 "Son et lumière" (complementing Vänskä's United States premiere of Aho's much more recent "Louhi").

It may just be that I have fallen under the influence of a city that has a Midsummer Music Festival, but I continue to believe that a performance of Mozart can still tell us a lot about what a conductor can (or cannot) do. Thus, however familiar the music itself may be, the performance of that music is as important as the performance of less familiar compositions. This time at least Kosman doubled the number of paragraphs devoted to this portion of Gilbert's program:

In between, Richard Goode was the soloist in a charming but tonally mismatched account of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 18 in B-Flat, K. 456. The pleasure of Goode's playing is its ineffable lightness; even in the athletic passages of the opening movement or the dark minor harmonies of the slow movement, he kept things fleet and translucent.

But he and Gilbert didn't seem to be in accord on this point. The orchestral playing was much heavier and more emphatic, which - depending on where a listener's attention was focused - either produced a sense of bombast from the orchestra or made Goode sound like a lightweight.

Once again we, as readers, had to contend with relatively stock phrases, which, when confronted with the reality of last night's performance (as opposed to Wednesday night's), did not appear to hold very much weight.

Most important is a need to recognize the broad scope of diversity that cuts across the canon of Mozart piano concertos. Symphony regulars got another "dose" of K. 482 about a month ago, when Jonathan Biss performed it with Herbert Blomstedt on the podium; and, as I have previously suggested, this particular concerto is very youthful in spirit, even if it is chronologically more "mature" than K. 456. Particularly in its first movement, K. 456 is a fabric of many voices, not just those of a give-and-take between piano and orchestra but also within the piano itself. Readers may recall that, for me, the most memorable part of Goode's Berkeley recital (now almost two months ago) was his command of the "discourse" among the three voices of the Well-Tempered Clavier fugue he played at the beginning of his recital. Mozart could display a similar command of such discourse in his keyboard writing, and Goode is a perfect pianist for bringing our ears into the thick of that discourse. More significantly is that a meeting between the multiple voices within the piano and the multiple voices across the orchestra demands significant "accord" (to use Kosman's terminology) between soloist and conductor; and Gilbert had a keen sense of how to engage his multiple resources with those at Goode's fingertips.

A good framework for this kind of performance can be found in the script of Amadeus. There we find Mozart writing about wanting to compose an opera scene that begins as a duet and keeps bringing in more and more characters, thus building up the complexity of the dialog that ensues. This is how the finale to the second act of The Marriage of Figaro was eventually realized. Ironically, Mozart was working on this in the time frame of K. 482. It might not be too far-fetched to view K. 456 as a "rehearsal" of this kind of strategy for managing multiple voices; and that kind of "rehearsal" continues into the two remaining movements of the concerto (although there is also a definite sense of that "inner twenty-year old" in the final movement).

None of this should detract from the attention that Kosman paid to Gilbert's approach to the twentieth-century repertoire, early or late. This is not to say that I subscribe to Kosman's approach to Nielsen. The truth is that I did not give Nielsen much thought until I invested in the recordings of all six symphonies that Blomstedt made with the San Francisco Symphony almost twenty years ago. I remember when Leonard Bernstein promoted the fifth of these symphonies back when I was a student, but I also remember having my curiosity piqued in later years by occasional radio broadcasts. Unlike Kosman, I have never been particularly concerned with matters of "idiosyncratic rhetoric and edgy harmonies." Rather, I was more interested in the way in which Gilbert achieved a significant difference in sound quality in his move from Mozart to Nielsen, then same way that Vänskä had done in his move from Mozart to Sibelius; and, to be more specific, I was interested in how the San Francisco Symphony was engaged to make that move along with Gilbert. Once again, this all comes down to the question of how the program for the entire evening is conceived. Last Thursday I wrote about the "architecture" of a program, because Nikolaj Znaider's recital felt like it was organized around an a priori static structure; but, in contrast, Gilbert's program (like Vänskä's) felt more like a journey. (This was a particularly appropriate metaphor for the program the New York Philharmonic presented on their visit to Pyongyang.) After all, Nielsen's own approach to composition could be seen as a journey from his listening experiences as a student to those of an adult experimenting with synthesizing experiences of his own (possibly in the context of support he received from Ferruccio Busoni, whose own career involved a rather extensive journey).

The way in which Gilbert and the Symphony "made the move" had less to do with whether or not Nielsen's symphony, whose four movements were inspired by the four ancient "temperaments" of choler, phlegm, melancholy, and sanguinity, was more "programmatic" than Mozart's concerto and more to do with a different strategy in how energy was being deployed. Nielsen may be less nuanced than Mozart; but Gilbert and the Symphony could make a virtue out of his more expansive (to invoke an adjective from his third symphony) sense of sound, which has as much emotional depth in its silences as it has when everyone is playing in full force. We could thus leave Davies with a sense of a journey worth making without worrying about whether or not one stop along that journey was, in any way, "better" than another.

This brings us to the "beginning" of this journey, Stucky's "Son et lumière," which was very much a high-energy affair. I have to say that I think that the title was a bit unfair, since it was named for those tourist-trap affairs that cover the world from the Egyptian pyramids to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, plagued by tendentious narration on top of orchestral forces putting out Hollywood sprawl at its worst. Stucky, on the other hand, was probably thinking about the relationship between sound and light in terms of the extent to which an orchestra could be applied as a palette of colors. There was no mention of Olivier Messiaen in the notes that Thomas May provided for this piece; but it was interesting to be able to listen to Stucky's composition in the context of having heard Messiaen's "L'Ascension" at the beginning of this year. In a manner that may be more consistent with Messiaen's mysticism than with Stucky's more cerebral bent, the latter's work seems to have less to do with "sound and light" than with "sound as light" (a position that is reinforced by some of Stucky's own remarks about the work). In that respect the journey began very much the way the Messiaen-to-Mahler journey had begun. This is an orchestra that knows how to be one of those palettes of colors, and Gilbert knew how to use them to deploy those colors.

To my ears, however, those colors came less from Messiaen and more from that earlier colorist, Richard Strauss. The opening (and also closing) gesture sounded to me, for all the world, like a percussion-only interpretation of the opening gesture of the latter's Elektra opera. This is not to say that Stucky's composition was an homage to either Strauss or that particular opera. However, it may have been why I came away dissatisfied with Stucky's choice of title, since I have always found sitting through an evening of Sophocles (even when tarted up by Strauss' orchestra excesses) far more satisfying that watching colored lights shining on the Parthenon!