Exactly a month ago, when I was writing my advance piece for the opening week of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), celebrating their 25th season with Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), I noted that tickets for the All San Francisco Concert were no longer available. I took this to be good news. This is an annual event presented for San Francisco social service and neighborhood organizations, in recognition and gratitude for the work these groups do to enrich the lives of and serve the citizens of San Francisco. Members of those organizations are invited to attend the concert as SFS guests, meaning that there is no charge for the tickets. Once the invited organizations claim their tickets, those that remain go on sale to the general public. My assumption was that no remaining tickets were on sale this year.
In the past I have made it a point to attend this concert, since it always involves introducing soloists that did not participate in the Opening Night Gala. Last night my first reaction was one of surprise: almost the entire row in front of me was empty! Given that, in the past, there had been no trouble filling all the seats, primarily as gifts to the community, and that audiences were almost always attentive and appreciative (more so than at some subscription concerts I have attended), I was more than a little perplexed. The good news is that those filling their seats were presented a thoroughly engaging evening that could not have represented what SFS stands for in a better light.
Last night departed from the usual format by presenting two guest soloists, rather than one. Furthermore, both of them formerly held the Concertmaster chair for the SFS Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) and had made the transition into professional music-making. The soloists were violinists Hannah Tarley and Alina Kobialka, each presenting a composition that provided an excellent framework to display both virtuosity and expressiveness.
Violinist Alina Kobialka (photograph by Anastasia Chernyavsky, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)
Kobialka’s selection was particularly daunting. Maurice Ravel composed his “Tzigane” to evoke gypsy styles of violin-playing. It was originally written for violin and piano. However, the piano could be fitted with a luthéal attachment, which could be used to evoke the sonorities of a cimbalom. “Tzigane” was first performed in this form in London on April 26, 1924. Ravel then orchestrated the piano part and the orchestral version was first played in Amsterdam on October 19, 1924. The latter is the version that was presented last night in Davies Symphony Hall.
Jascha Heifetz’ recording of the orchestral version (with Alfred Wallenstein conducing the Los Angeles Philharmonic) lasts a little over eight minutes. Roughly the first half of that duration is devoted entirely to a killer solo violin cadenza, and it is only near the end of the piece that orchestral sonorities begin to hold their own against all the violin fireworks. Kobialka endowed those fireworks with the full complement of rich expressiveness that they deserved, all realized with full respect for the underlying technical demands. The music itself may have been 99.44% spectacle, but Kobialka’s performance was one that made any serious listener sit up and take notice.
Tarley’s selection preceded Kobialka’s by over half a century, but it was no less a platform for dazzling virtuosity. She played Camille Saint-Saëns’ Opus 28, a Rondo capriccioso preceded by an Introduction. The Rondo section is rich in virtuoso demands to keep the recurring theme from sounding repetitions, while the Introduction provides a platform for more cadenza-like technical display. Tarley was equally at home in both domains, and she could be downright playful in her approach to the Rondo portion.
Less consistent was the support provided by MTT. Kobialka had the advantage, given the paucity of instrumental interjections. On the other hand it occasionally seemed as if MTT was not quite aligned to the ways in which Tarley could shape he solo passages with subtle shifts in the underlying beat. Indeed, there was even some sense that MTT was not entirely aware of what Tarley was doing with the pacing of her solo part. As a result, there were passages in he and seemed to be leading when he should have been following.
Tarley took her solo midway through the first half of the program, and Kobialka led off the second half. “Tzigane” was followed by a “duo encore.” Tarley returned to the stage for a performance of the first movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1043 concerto for two violins in D minor. Both soloists clearly knew how to capture the spirit of jamming at the Café Zimmermann, where Bach would hang out with his Collegium Musicum colleagues after his move to Leipzig. The SFS strings provided an acceptable account of the accompaniment, even if the harpsichord continuo was inaudible with the instrument banished to the percussion section at the rear of the stage. What was important was that both Tarley and Kobialka knew how to honor the spirit of Bach’s music-making with the same informed technique they brought to their respective interpretations of Saint-Saëns and Ravel.
The entire program was framed by the two selections from the first and second halves of the Opening Night Gala, respectively: the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Lyudmila and Benjamin Britten’s Opus 34 set of variations on the “Rondeau” theme from Henry Purcell’s Abdelazer suite, best known as “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” Once again, the Britten performance was enhanced by Luke Kritzeck’s lighting design, which highlighted the different players taking their respective solos. (Kritzeck was credited in the program book for the Opening Night Gala; last night the only credit was verbal acknowledgement by MTT, who definitely deserves thanks for compensating for the negligence of the printed program.)
The intermission was preceded by a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which the composer described as an “Overture-Fantasy.” MTT presented a reading that could be appreciated for the rich palette of sonorities that Tchaikovsky could elicit from instrumental resources, even relatively early in his career as a composer. I was particularly aware of how Russ deLuna’s English horn work subtly alters the shading of the low strings during the “love theme” music, probably the best-known passage from the composition. SFS may not have dazzled the audience as much as Tarley and Kobialka did, but there was no shortage of shining qualities in their ensemble work.
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