Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), presented its first concert in 2020. There was an orderly sense of symmetry in the design of the program. Two compositions by French composers, one from the nineteenth century and the other from the twentieth, framed two settings of German texts. The second of these presented the music that Gustav Mahler composed for poems collected in the Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the youth’s magic horn) anthology of folk poetry. The first was the world premiere of Meditations on Rilke, settings of six poems by Rainer Maria Rilke composed by MTT.
The twentieth-century French composer was Maurice Ravel; and the program concluded with his “choreographic poem” “La Valse.” This was decidedly the high point of the evening. Ravel was supported by a commission by Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballet Russes and the first serious champion of the young composer Igor Stravinsky. After Ravel completed the composition, Diaghilev rejected it as unsuitable for choreography. Nevertheless, the music took hold in the concert hall and cannot be avoided in any serious discussion of the history of twentieth-century music.
Sketches for “La Valse” date back to 1906, but Diaghilev’s commission only came in 1919. Between those two dates lies the entirety of World War I. Ravel tried to enlist in the French Air Force but was rejected due to both age and a minor heart condition. By 1915, the year in which he turned 40, he was driving a truck for the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment. Ravel survived the war, but the psychological toll was pronounced. In many ways “La Valse” was his way of working through the demons of his war memories. It is not surprising that Diaghilev could not see choreographic possibilities. The waltz is being danced by the shell-shocked, many of whom can barely count off the three beats of each measure.
For all those horrors, however, “La Valse” still serves up some of the richest instrumentation devices one is likely to find over the course of the history of music. All too often, however, optimistic listeners are inclined to revel in those lush sounds, missing out on the restless rhythmic patterns that only barely suggest a three-beat metrical pattern (hence Diaghilev’s skepticism about using the music for a ballet). Fortunately, MTT is well-acquainted with this composition; and last night’s performance served up an account of the score that highlighted the many subtleties of Ravel’s technique while never trying to short-change the nightmarish qualities of the rhetoric. This was, indeed, a performance to remember; and memory was facilitated by it serving to conclude the program.
Mezzo Sasha Cooke (from the SFS event page for her recital this coming May)
Intensity of rhetoric could also be found in the four Mahler Wunderhorn settings, sung by mezzo Sasha Cooke. Mahler first composed his Wunderhorn songs for piano accompaniment, later working on instrumental settings. This is true even of the last of Cooke’s selections, “Urlicht” (primal light), which subsequently found its way to serving as the penultimate movement of the second (“Resurrection”) symphony. Nevertheless, all four of last night’s selections (including “Urlicht”) involved relatively modest instrumentation when compared with Mahler’s symphony compositions. Cooke clearly appreciated the intimacy of the orchestral support and reflected it in her delivery of the four texts, bringing just the right level of intensity to the darker narratives in the last three of her four selections. As a result, all of the vocal work meshed seamlessly into the instrumental transparency evoked by MTT’s conducting.
The first half of the program was more problematic. In choosing to set Rilke’s poetry, MTT joins a rather prodigious list of composers that took on the same goal. Those composers include Alma Mahler, Anton Webern, and Ernst Krenek. One might say that his texts have been embraced by “post-Lieder” composers, and one can even find several settings by Krzysztof Penderecki.
Nevertheless, the challenge imposed by Rilke poems is the intensely personal stance one encounters in many (most?, all?) of them. While the poetry may have been conceived for recitation, these are texts that hold up to the luxury of solitary reading. One can follow the words and hear them in the mind, but the eye can also wander across the page discovering no end of links from the word itself to both its past and its future. Rilke is very much a literary poet; and the program book had the advantage of offering up translations by an equally literary American poet, Robert Bly.
Rilke’s verbal intensity poses significant challenges to any effort to shape music around the words. MTT may have made a noble effort to rise to those challenges, but the results never came close to any literary heights. To the contrary, there was too much of a sense of individual notes hanging on individual syllables with as little sense of the grammar of the text as of its semantics and rhetoric, even with the benefit of the vocal interpretative skills of both Cooke and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny. To be fair, the title of the music makes it clear that these are MTT’s Meditations; but so much can be mined from even many of the individual phrases in Rilke’s poems that one is left wondering just what was the basis for those meditations that led to their realization through music.
Also disappointing was the opening French selection, the overture to Hector Berlioz’ Opus 23 opera Benvenuto Cellini. Like Ravel, Berlioz had an awesomely prodigious command of instrumental resources. Last night, however, many of the finest moments of this overture were drowned out by the three timpanists. Indeed, one could barely hear the opening themes played by the entire string section. While the opera itself receives relatively little attention, this overture has become a favorite among many audiences; and, thanks to its rich recording legacy, many of those listeners are familiar with most of the tunes. Nevertheless, however, familiar they may be, one still wants to be able to hear them being played; and the balances in last night’s performance made such hearing a real challenge.
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