Yesterday afternoon in Davies Symphony Hall it felt as if the concert by the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) had not lived up to the standards set by previous performances. Wattis Foundation Music Director Christian Reif may have been aware of shortcomings and tried to compensate by making sure that the final selection was far more than up to snuff. However, this was the third in a set in which both of the other two suggested that there had not been adequate rehearsal time.
That final selection was the second of two suites that Georges Bizet extracted from the incidental music he composed for Alphonse Daudet’s play in three acts and five tableaux, L’Arlésienne (the woman of Arles). That play was an extended dramatization of a (very) short story of the same title that Daudet published in his collection Letters from My Windmill. It involves a simple young man whose love for an “exotic” woman is unrequited. On the night of her (very) festive marriage celebration, he ends it all by hurling himself from the room of his house.
The high point of Bizet’s second suite is the concluding movement, which sees the wedding party wrapped up in dancing a wildly ecstatic farandole, establishing the context for the protagonist’s suicide. Bizet pulls out all of the instrumental stops to milk as much as possible from two relatively simple themes that may well have originated as folk tunes. Reif pushed the intensity of this movement to the max, and the SFSYO players had no problem with delivering what he demanded. Equally effective, however, were many of the quieter passages, particularly those in the third Menuetto movement involving flutist Phoebe Lin and harpist Tiffany Wong.
The “main attraction,” however, involved the performance of nine excerpts from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 492 opera, The Marriage of Figaro. This began with the overture followed by a series of vocal selections the provided a skeletal account of the opera’s plot. Reif tied these excerpts together by describing what was happening as that plot advanced from one selection to the next.
Adler Fellows SeokJong Baek, Ashley Dixon, and Christian Pursell (top row) and Mary Evelyn Hangley and Natalie Image (bottom row) singing with SFSYO (from the San Francisco Symphony event page)
All of the leading roles were taken by vocalists that are currently 2019 Adler Fellows with the San Francisco Opera. These included soprano Mary Evelyn Hangley as the Countess Rosina Almaviva, baritone SeokJong Baek as her husband, the Count Almaviva, soprano Natalie Image as the Countess’ maid Susanna, baritone Christian Pursell as the count’s valet Figaro, and mezzo Ashley Dixon as the Count’s page, Cherubino. For the final scene, “bit parts” were taken by four students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music: bass Wilford Kelly as Bartolo, mezzo Emma Sharp as his housekeeper Marcellina, tenor Christopher Wall as the music teacher Basilio, and baritone Jorge Ruvalcaba as the Count’s gardener Antonio.
By that final scene, this amounted to quite a few additional bodies sharing the stage with SFSYO. It also required that both the musicians and their conductor rise to challenges of balance that are not encountered in the performance of either a concerto or an orchestral art song. Sadly, those challenges were rarely satisfactorily met. The two lead sopranos tended to fare best of all, while Baek’s portrayal of the Count was probably the weakest link in the chain.
More problematic, however, was that all of those vocalists tended to draw attention way from both the SFSYO players and Reif’s direction. One might grant that this undertaking provided the young musicians with an appreciation of how and why the work in the orchestra pit of an opera house differs from that on the stage of a concert hall, but Mozart’s music sets a very high bar for leaning those lessons. As is the case in so many of his piano concertos, the real action emerges through the roles played by the winds, brass, and timpani. Indeed, in Mozart’s earlier K. 384 opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (the abduction from the seraglio), Konstanze’s show-stopping aria “Martern aller Arten” (tortures unrelenting) seems to have been conceived as a sinfonia concertante movement in which the soprano is just another instrument added to solo parts for flute, oboe, violin, and cello.
Reif was clearly sensitive to all the detailed thought that Mozart had put into his instrumental writing. Furthermore, he showed a keen sense of balancing those resources against the music allotted to the singers. Thus, he had no trouble changing the number of strings performing from one section to the next, always with a keen ear as to how those instruments would balance against the vocal lines. For all of that support, however, it was clear that the Adlers were out of their element; and it was more than a little unfortunate that Mozart was the one stuck with having to pay the price.
Actually, Mozart was not the only victim yesterday afternoon. Claude Debussy did not fare much better with the performance of Ibéria, the three-movement suite that constitutes the second of the three orchestral compositions that Debussy called Images. This piece is so rich in both thematic and instrumental detail that it is all but impossible to take in over the course of a single listening experience. I have immersed myself in this piece through both recordings and performances since graduate school, and I still discover new twists and turns in the logic that Debussy brought to creating it.
Unfortunately, even some of the broader strokes of the composition, particularly at the beginning of the feast-day revelries in the final movement, never quite registered yesterday afternoon. My personal diagnostic opinion is that even firming up the basic shapes of this music requires a generous amount of rehearsal, particularly when the performers may be encountering the piece for the first time (which was probably the case for many, in not most, in the SFSYO ensemble). I would then suspect that time that had gone into establishing a good working relationship between the Adlers and the instrumentalists detracted from the amount of time that could be allotted to preparing Debussy’s music. (Note the italicization; where such matters are concerned, even the most attentive listener can do no more than speculate.)
At least the splendid account of Bizet could let those attentive listeners leave the hall with some sense of satisfaction.
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