Alternative “Three Bs” at Davies Symphony Hall

SFS Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt (photograph by Jürgen M. Pietsch, courtesy of SFS)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall. the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) gave the first of three subscription performances of what might be called an “alternative ‘Three Bs’” concert. The familiar “B composer” was Johannes Brahms, whose Opus 90 (third) symphony in F major filled the second half of the program. The first half, on the other hand, was devoted entirely to the first symphony in G minor by the “Swedish B,” Franz Berwald. The “third B” was to be found on the Davies podium with the annual return of Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt for the first of his two weeks of subscription concerts.

For this writer, it was a bit of a relief to get a break from all that Beethoven250 programming that SFS has planned. Mind you, Blomstedt will not be ignoring Beethoven entirely, since he will be conducting the Opus 36 (second) symphony in D major in next week’s subscription concert. Nevertheless, the Berwald symphony made for an alternative perspective on nineteenth-century practices; and, for most of us in the audience, it also made for a new perspective, since the symphony had not been performed in Davies since December of 1991, when it was conducted by (you guessed it) Blomstedt.

This piece was completed in 1842 and subsequently revised between 1843 and 1844. To put this into the perspective of the rest of the program, Brahms would have been around ten years old during that period of revision. Ironically, Berwald completed the first version of his symphony while he was visiting Vienna, but he was there for his expertise in orthopedics. Both the first performance of this symphony, given the name “Sinfonie sérieuse,” and its subsequent revisions took place in Stockholm.

The “seriousness” of the symphony owes much to its G minor key. However, any expectations of large bleeding hunks of dark rhetoric are immediately dispersed with the highly imaginative approach to instrumentation that dominates the opening measures. The opening “fanfare” has the usual combination of winds and strings; but it is distinctively colored by the addition of three trombones.

Over the course of the entire symphony, Berwald never short-changes those trombone parts, invoking them to shape just about every significant rhetorical gesture in the symphony. Indeed, the overall impression is that the progress of the symphony owes as much to its shifts in instrumental coloration as it is does to the more traditional practices of thematic development and harmonic progression. The result is an overall listening experience in which the thematic material is readily accessible, but it is the sonorous qualities that seize and maintain attentive listening. It therefore almost goes without saying that the engaging qualities of last night’s performance owed much to Blomstedt’s sensitivity to those sonorities and his intimate chemistry with the entire SFS ensemble in bringing those sonorities to listener attention.

For that matter sonority figured significantly in the Brahms symphony. His blends may have been somewhat more conventional than Berwald’s had been. Nevertheless, he, too, appreciated the rhetorical impact of low brass sounds, particularly when they blended with low strings. The symphony is also distinguished by its “cyclic” structure, through which the vigorous flow of the opening theme returns in the final measures of the last movement with far more introspective (if not melancholic) dispositions. There is an ambiguity in that coda leaving the listener wondering whether the rhetoric was one of a satisfying conclusion or disquieting uncertainty.

That latter disposition may have something to do with a “latent” connection to Robert Schumann in Brahms’ Opus 90. Schumann would have been dead for almost 30 years when this symphony was first performed. Yet the theme that both begins and concludes the symphony may have been a reflection on Brahms friendship with Schumann. If one listens in just the right way, one may recognize that this “cyclic” theme can be traced back to a brief bridge passage in the first movement of Schumann’s Opus 97 (“Rhenish”) symphony in E-flat major. Two of Schumann’s own symphonies, but not this one, were cyclic in nature; and Brahms would have known both of them well. Thus, one can easily imagine that Brahms’ own approach to such cyclic form might have been triggered by a mere fragment of Schumann easily overlooked by most listeners!

Blomstedt conducted his Brahms with a much larger string section than he had allocated for Berwald. This was a judicious decision. The transparency of Berwald’s sonorities owed much to keeping the string section from overwhelming the rest of the ensemble. In the Brahms symphony, on the other hand, the full complement of resources allows the winds and brass to hold their own against a much bolder assembly of string resources. Such attention to that sort of detail is yet another reason why Blomstedt’s performances with SFS are so consistently compelling and why his annual visits continue to be so welcome.