Last night in the Carolyn H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), Christian Reif conducted the final Conservatory Orchestra concert of the season. Presumably several (if not more) of the SFCM students were familiar with Reif’s conducting as members of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO), where Reif just concluded his tenure as Music Director. However, when he was at his best, his command of communicating with the entire ensemble was as solid as it had consistently been in Davies Symphony Hall.
This was particularly true of the final selection on the program, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 36 (fourth) symphony in F minor. Noted (or notorious) for the intensity of its rhetoric, this symphony poses major challenges to even the most experienced conductors. It is so easy to overindulge the expressiveness of that rhetoric that it often seems that the best of conductors are prone to bathing in the lush sonorities, rather than leading those producing those sonorities.
There is no doubt that Reif conducted with broad expressive strokes. However, it was just as clear that he was using his body language to communicate with every member of the ensemble. He had well-defined ideas about how the four movements of this symphony should progress, and he could not have done a better job of bringing those ideas to realization. This was an account of Opus 36 that one could enjoy for the music itself, rather that wallowing in the intensity of its emotions.
Sadly, the first half of the program was not as compelling. The concerto selection was Camille Saint-Saëns’ Opus 103 (“Egyptian”) piano concerto in F major. The soloist was Jinzhao Xu (class of ’20), winner of the SFCM Concerto Competition. He clearly had no trouble leaping through all of the hoops that the score demanded of him; and, for the most part, his technique was agile.
Nevertheless, his focused attention of dexterity seems to have distracted him from attending just as much to dynamics. While it may not have been exactly the case, the overall impression was that he thundered his way through the full extent of the concerto’s solo writing. Indeed, there were times that the thundering was so imposing that even the most attentive listener ran the risk of losing touch with the orchestra. The result was an overall reading of the score that lost touch with the instrumental sonorities of the ensemble, thus ignoring Saint-Saëns’ attention to coloration, which was almost always as strong as his challenging keyboard technique.
Lack of balance in the ensemble was equally problematic in the opening selection, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” Setting aside the question of whether or not Rimsky-Korsakov’s arrangement undermined many, if not most, of Mussorgsky’s intentions, the case remains that, like Saint-Saëns, Rimsky-Korsakov had a keen ear for instrumental coloration. This was clearly evident last week in Davies when Simone Young conducted his Opus 35 Scheherazade; and it was just as true of this smaller-scale approach to someone else’s music.
It was therefore more than a little disconcerting that the overall balance of the ensemble fell out of whack during the early stages of this piece and never really recovered. This was more than a little disturbing, since Rimsky-Korsakov was particularly skilled at having the sounds come at the listener from every which way as his way of capturing the orgiastic qualities of the music. Unfortunately, there were too many instances of one set of striking colors getting overwhelmed by another set that had just had its say.
The overall result was that Reif’s encounter with the Conservatory Orchestra was less compelling than any of his past SFSYO concerts, leading one to wonder just how much time had been allotted for the preparation of last night’s presentation.
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