Dazzling Mozart and Sibelius from SFS at Davies

German violinist Christian Tetzlaff (from the event page for this week’s concert on the SFS Web site)

Last night Davies Symphony Hall hosted the first of four performances given by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) to preview the final national tour the ensemble will make before Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) concludes his 25-year tenure. The program followed the conventional overture-concerto-symphony format, featuring violinist Christian Tetzlaff as concerto soloist. Tetzlaff will perform with SFS at the first five cities on this eight-city tour.

The concerto selection was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 216 (third) violin concerto in G major; and, if last night was representative, those cities that will get to listen to Tetzlaff play this concerto will be in for a real treat. This is one of the five violin concertos that Mozart composed in 1775 (at the age of nineteen) during his employment as a court musician for Hieronymus von Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. Considering that Mozart was probably not particularly happy with either his job or his employment, there is a decided “sunny disposition” (to borrow a phrase from John Cage) about this concerto.

Tetzlaff was clearly aware of that disposition and honored it with a generous supply of witty turns, several of which were reinforced by MTT’s leadership from the podium. One might think that Mozart had decided that he could one-up the rich abundance of wit that flowed from the pen of his contemporary Joseph Haydn; but it is unlikely that the two met until after he had begun his career in Vienna in 1781. Furthermore, if Mozart’s manuscript did not provide Tetzlaff with enough opportunities to smile (if not belly-laugh), Tetzlaff cooked up a few of his own by providing his own cadenza material. The setting may have been “contemporary,” rather than “historical;” and the violin sections may have been a bit on the heavy side. Nevertheless, this was still a reading of Mozart that sparkled in every imaginable way, probably more than would have been encountered in Colloredo’s rather stuffy environment.

If the concerto served up elegant wit in a relatively intimate setting, the symphony offered far more intense drama on a much more massive scale. The selection was Jean Sibelius’ Opus 43 (second) symphony in D major. Sibelius completed this symphony in 1902, the same year in which Gustav Mahler completed his fifth symphony; and, when one considers the broad scope of dramatic rhetoric in Sibelius’ symphony coupled with no end of imaginative approaches to instrumentation, it is hard to avoid thinking of how Mahler deployed similar skills.

Sibelius would eventually meet Mahler when the latter traveled to Helsinki, but that meeting did not take place until 1907. Nevertheless, those who have followed MTT’s tenure with SFS would probably have no trouble identifying the many ways in which his rhetorical approach to the Sibelius second was informed by his experiences in conducting Mahler’s music. This was evident not only in MTT’s rich sense of sonorous coloration through almost microscopic attention to instrumental sonorities but also in his management of dynamics, particularly in escorting the listener through the gradual increase of the decibel level over the course of the final coda, a succession of auditory waves with the crest of each wave gradually but recognizably louder than its predecessor. Last night was a reading of Opus 43 sure to seize the attention of even those who thought they knew the score like the back of their hand.

The only disappointment of the evening came at the very beginning with Maurice Ravel’s orchestral version of his suite Le Tombeau de Couperin. Like most listeners I first came to know the music in its orchestral form, encountering the original piano version (with its two additional movements) much later in life. However, it was only through that piano version that I really became aware of any “Couperin connection,” the only part of which that shows up in the orchestral version being the elements of formal structure.

Nevertheless, that orchestral version has the same transparent qualities of instrumentation that surface in so many of Ravel’s other orchestral works. Unfortunately, much of that transparency was either blurred or obscured in last’s night reading of the score. There were too many passages in which the energetic rhythms (requiring both deft and delicate fingering at the piano keyboard) emerged from the strings as little more than mush. Fortunately, much of Ravel’s instrumentation focused on the imaginative scoring of wind and brass resources (along with any number of ear-catching moments for a single harp). As a result, there were many engaging moments in last night’s performance; but the overall impression of the composition taken as a whole came across as a disappointing failure to get at the sonorities Ravel’s score was trying to convey.