Bartók Informed by Ravel at Heras-Casado Visit

Conductor Pablo Heras-Casado (from his San Francisco Symphony event page)

Last night Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado returned to Davies Symphony Hall for his annual appearance as visiting conductor of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). The concerto soloist for this week’s series of subscription concerts was also Spanish, pianist Javier Perianes, who also seems to be becoming a regular visitor to San Francisco. He made his San Francisco debut with SFS in June of 2015 with Charles Dutoit serving as guest conductor; and, in May of 2017, he made his San Francisco recital debut in the final program of that season’s Piano Series presented by San Francisco Performances.

Last night’s concerto selection, on the other hand, could not have been more distant from Spain. It was the last of Béla Bartók’s three piano concertos, completed in New York in 1945. Bartók delayed work on his viola concerto to make sure he completed the piano concerto before his death. He had planned it as a surprise for his wife Ditta, and many believed that he had hoped she would be able to sustain herself by giving performances of it once she was on her own.

Compared to the two preceding piano concertos, the third is far less aggressive, leading many to assume that Bartók had deliberately “tamed” it to improve his wife’s chances of getting bookings to play it. There are even a few passages whose playfulness reminds the listener of Bartók’s capacity for wit in better times. What is particularly impressive, however, is that this is a concerto in which the instrumental sonorities of the orchestra contribute to expressiveness as much as the elaborately conceived piano work. This puts it in the same “league” as Bartók’s earlier “Concerto for Orchestra,” not to mention the Opus 125 “Symphony-Concerto” by Sergei Prokofiev performed in Davies last week by cellist Truls Mørk under SFS visiting conductor Manfred Honeck. (Prokofiev, however, did not compose his Opus 125 until over five years elapsed after Bartók’s death.)

Much of the impact of Bartók’s final piano concerto involves his departure from his preferred percussive approach to the keyboard in favor of more lyrical thematic material. He could thus use the orchestral ensemble to reflect on that material through different approaches to instrumental coloration. Those colors, in turn, provide the context for the rhetorical stances taken by the soloist, resulting in an ongoing kaleidoscope of both sonorities and expressive dispositions.

Mind you, the display of skillful pianistic technique, of the sort that Perianes summoned for last night’s performance, always runs the risk of upstaging what the rest of the instruments are doing. However, Heras-Casado deployed a clever maneuver to raise awareness of instrumental activity. He preceded the Bartók concerto with Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of “Alborada del gracioso” (morning song of the jester), originally one of the five movements of a suite for solo piano he had entitled Miroirs (mirrors).

What had originally been conceived in terms of intense demands upon the full scope of keyboard technique was reconceived as an abundantly rich palette of instrumental sonorities. For those sitting in Davies, the impact of those sonorities could be reinforced by “visual input" regarding which players were the sources of which of those sonorities. There are few pieces in which the activities of the orchestra players are both so diverse and so intensive. Up on the podium Heras-Casado knew just how to balance all of those sonorities in such a way that any recollection of the original piano version could be found only in the insights Heras-Casado brought to the overall textures of rhythm.

“Alborado del gracioso” thus provided a first-rate account of the breadth of scope of the instrumental resources up on stage. When the program shifted to Bartók, most of those resources were still there. They clearly were being put to use for different purposes; but, as a result of Heras-Casado’s perceptive approach to Ravel, one could appreciate that Bartók’s purposes were just as significant and rhetorically compelling.

Following his concerto performance, Perianes offered his audience an encore. He selected the last of the four mazurkas (in the key of A minor) in Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 17 collection. This seemed to suggest that one good Eastern European turn deserves another; and Perianes’ attentiveness to his “source text” could not have been more solid. For my money, however, he seemed to dwell more on the melancholia of the A minor key than on any sense of the mazurka being a dance form. As a result, the distinctive three-beat pattern, whose shift in pulse clearly distinguishes it from a waltz, was all but entirely absent. What emerged was deep sadness where wistfulness would have been more appropriate. (On the other hand, going a bit overboard on the rhetoric was a bit of a relief after the featureless approach to Chopin in Davies last Sunday night.)

The second half of last night’s program returned to Spain through a familiar coupling of more Ravel with Claude Debussy. The Debussy offering was Ibéria, the three-movement suite in a collection of three compositions given the overall title Images pour orchestre. (In other words this the second of a collection of three pieces, which, in turn, consisted of three movements.) Composed in 1908, Ibéria was composed two years after the piano version of “Alborado del gracioso” but about ten years before the orchestral version.

Like that latter version, Ibéria establishes a rich palette of sonorities and works it to its fullest extent. In addition, the music is as diverse in its approaches to rhythm as it is in its sonorities. Indeed, the final movement, depicting the celebration of a feast day, even descends at one point into drunken revelry, serving up a delightful reminder of Debussy’s capacity for wit. The program then concluded with Ravel’s “Boléro,” playing to an audience that had now been “conditioned” to respond to the rich diversity of instrumental sonorities.

As just about everyone knows, Ravel’s piece grows out of an ostinato rhythmic pattern played on the snare drum. Heras-Casado decided this was significant enough to give Percussion Principal Jacob Nissly a “front and center” position in the ensemble, rather than relegating him to the rest of the Percussion section in their usual Siberian locale. Heras-Casado could not have been better at realizing the gradual crescendo that is the primary feature of Ravel’s score. As the theme migrated from solo instruments to small groups to orchestral sections and ultimately to full ensemble, Heras-Casado was at the top of his game in calling attention to the significance of each color arising from Ravel’s scrupulous approach to instrumentation. Familiar as this music may be, this was an account that left all those in Davies totally breathless at the final chord before erupting into one of the more thunderous ovations that hall has experienced.