Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, British conductor Martyn Brabbins made his United States debut leading the first performance of the final program of the 107th season of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). The program was organized around a semi-staged production of Maurice Ravel’s one-act opera “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (the child and the magic spells), which featured the advanced projection techniques of animator Grégoire Pont, working with director James Bonas. Brabbins was recruited to replace the convalescing Michael Tilson Thomas; and he could not have been a better choice, since he had conducted the premiere performance of this production at the Opéra National de Lyon in 2012.
In a nutshell the opera is a moral tale about a very bad boy who is taken to task by the home in which he lives. This includes not only furniture and wallpaper but also, in the second part, the wildlife outside his house. The turning point comes when he heals an injured squirrel, resulting in a happy ending in which the child once again appreciates the value of his mother as a role model. The text was written by Colette, whose keen eye for the human condition was as skillful as her capacity for consistently finding just the right words for both description and character establishment.
The result was one of Ravel’s wittier compositions in which the music engagingly follows every turn in Colette’s plot with uncanny perception. Just as importantly, Ravel captured the intimacy of the situations Colette contrived and the delicacy with which she handled them. Nevertheless, my first contact with that delicacy took place in the vast space of the Metropolitan Opera House back in the Eighties, from which I learned that intimacy, more often than not, is in the eye of the beholder.
That said, I suspect it would be quite a challenge for even the most sympathetic viewer to find much intimacy in Pont’s concepts for this production. Not only were his projections larger than life but also they occasionally spilled off the confines of the “big screen” to take over the ceiling of the audience area. A little domestic tale with a variety of supernatural phenomena summoned to teach the virtues of good behavior exploded grotesquely into a setting more at home in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The result was a perfect example of what a 1997 television film called “weapons of mass distraction.” Indeed, the distraction was so intense that one was only barely aware of the SFS musicians; and, had it not been for the projection of the text, one could easily have been unaware of the vocal and choral singers. This was more than unfortunate, since so many of those on the vocal side had much to offer in bringing life to Colette’s words, beginning with the solid account that mezzo Isabel Leonard gave in her realization of the little boy’s character.
All the other roles were handled with multiple casting. Among the most memorable were tenor Ben Jones in the personification of arithmetic and the syllabic personification of the two cats by mezzo Ginger Costa-Jackson and bass-baritone Kelly Markgraf. The choral realization of animal sounds during the transition to the second part was also delightfully memorable.
The first half of the program was described as an “aperitif” to prepare for Ravel’s score. These were all chamber music selections; but, because the screen interfered with setting up an effective shell, none of them fared very well. Nevertheless, given the current nature of social life here in San Francisco (as well as many other parts of the world) Costa-Jackson definitely needs to be credited for her delivery of the last song that Debussy ever wrote, “Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison” (Christmas carol for homeless children). This was an occasion when the projected titles of the English translation definitely added to the impact of the listening experience.
Ravel was represented by the final movement from his Ma mère l’Oye piano duet suite, played by John Wilson and Peter Grunberg. (Grunberg also accompanied Costa-Jackson’s Debussy performance.) Wilson gave relatively dull accounts of movements from Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite and the instrumental version of “La Plus que lente” (the slower than slow), and Douglas Rioth’s harp work was an inadequate substitute for the cimbalom sonorities originally intended. The other selection was the final movement of Gabriel Fauré’s Opus 15 (first) piano quartet in C minor, played by the same musicians that had performed the piece in its entirety during the Chamber Music Series concert given at the end of April. That included pianist Sayaka Tanikawa, who was as brilliant as she had been in April and definitely deserved to be playing under better circumstances.
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