Michael Tilson Thomas (photograph by Art Streiber, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)
Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) launched its 2019–20 season with its annual Opening Night Gala. The mood was more festive than usual, since the occasion marked a celebration of the quarter-century of service by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), who will retire and the end of the season. The first sign that this would be a special evening came even before the annual singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with a performance of the Fanfare-Rondeau movement from the first of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s Suite of Symphonies for brass, strings and timpani, with a flourish of improvisatory riffs from Principal Trumpet Mark Inouye as the movement drew to a close. (Most of the audience probably recognized this as the theme for what was Masterpiece Theatre when MTT arrived to lead the SFS in 1995 and is now called simply Masterpiece.)
The program was performed without intermission. The amount of music was relatively modest, leaving more time for tributes and MTT with his own set of riffs on personal reflections. In many respects the program itself amounted to MTT’s “my favorite things” selections, combining compositions that he had performed frequently in the past with works by close personal relationships. Indeed, the program even included a world premiere performance, that of Gordon Getty’s arrangement of “Shenandoah.”
This piece was originally composed for solo voice, piano, and cello. However, while the version for chorus and orchestra had been recorded for Getty’s Beauty Come Dancing album, this was the first time it was given a concert performance. Getty himself calls this arrangement a tribute to the performance of the tune by Waring and His Pennsylvanians, one of the most popular choral groups during the Forties and Fifties led by founder Fred Waring. (Much of the choral music I sang in high school came from Waring editions.) Nevertheless, Getty’s version is a tribute, rather than an homage; and there is a sophistication in his polyphony that throws the old Waring version into an entirely new light.
Nevertheless, for all of the well-deserved attention accorded to MTT, for my own tastes the high point of the evening came from the piccolo work of Catherine Payne. First she led of the fugue section of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 47, “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” given the subtitle “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell.” (The subtitle is generally preferred when this music is performed without narration, which is how it was played last night.) However, at the end of the evening, she poured her heart out into the rich piccolo work in the coda of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125 (ninth) symphony in D minor. Only the final movement, setting Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” poem, was performed; but, within that movement’s vast instrumental and vocal resources, it felt as if the piccolo soared above the fray for the final climax.
Perhaps this just had to do with where the real energy resided. While both soprano Susanna Phillips and mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano gave clear and credible accounts of their respective parts, the male vocalists, tenor Jonathan Tetelman and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, who had the most extensive solo work, never seemed credibly engaged with the prevailing rhetoric. McKinny was equally detached in his account of the two selections from Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs collection, where his English-language delivery was also marred by poor diction. Ultimately, it was the orchestra and chorus that gave Beethoven the treatment he deserved. The instrumentalists were also at the top of their game at the beginning of the program in performing the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila.
It is also worth noting that the program credited lighting designed by Luke Kritzeck. Most of this involved ambient settings that were at their best for being unobtrusive. However, Kritzeck did a splendid job of consistently highlighting the participating instruments during the performance of Britten’s Opus 47. Just as Jordan Whitelaw could direct a crew of television cameras to point in the right direction towards the stage of Boston’s Symphony Hall to capture every instrumentalist’s individual contribution, so did Kritzeck’s lighting make sure that the audience was always looking at the appropriate solo activity.
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