Thursday, November 25, 2021

SFS: Holiday Season Off to Rocky Start

These days it seems as if the end-of-year holiday season has come to begin with Thanksgiving, particularly where shopping is concerned. Thus, while the annual “seasonal” programming of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) does not get under way until next month, this week Thanksgiving Day is flanked on either side by a “prologue” to the season in the form of a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony in D minor. (Think of December as Der Ring des Nibelungen and this week as Das Rheingold.)

Conductor Daniel Stewart (from the SFS event page for the program being discussed)

This week the conductor is Daniel Stewart, Wattis Foundation Music Director of the SFS Youth Orchestra, which gave its first performance of the season this past Sunday. Similarly, last night marked the first performance of the season by the SFS Chorus, prepared for the occasion by Assistant Director David Xiques. They were joined by the quartet of vocal soloists consisting of  soprano Michelle Bradley, mezzo Jennifer Johnson Cano, tenor Mario Chang, and baritone Rod Gilfry. All vocal resources were placed in the Terrace, allowing for the Chorus vocalists to be properly distanced to deal with COVID-19 conditions. The soloists took front-and-center positions, also in the Terrace.

Sadly, what could have been an invigorating festive occasion in advance of today’s holiday turned out to be a disconcerting slog. Stewart’s conducting was energetically spirited; and his approach to tempo was entirely suitable, not only for the overall duration but also for pacing the “journey” through the contrasting dispositions of the four movements. Unfortunately, his keen sense of tempo was not matched by particularly adequate balancing of his resources. Indeed, for the better part of the performance, it seems as if the timpani were leading the way, giving the impression of a concerto for timpani and orchestra, rather than a symphony. (Mind you, Beethoven provided any number of rhetorically significant moments for the timpani; but he was just attentive to the roles played by the rest of the ensemble.)

The vocal side got off to an equally disconcerting start with a prevailing uncertainty of pitch in Gilfry’s solo. Once the other soloists joined the mix, the blend was more convincingly solid. However, the soloists then had to deal with the full force of the Chorus, as much a dominating force as the timpani were for the instrumentalists. The overall result was thus an abundance of sound and fury with too little evidence of meaningful signification.

Ironically, the program began with the West Coast premiere of Anna Clyne’s “Sound and Fury.” William Shakespeare’s Macbeth was one of the two sources that inspired the composition of this tone poem, which lasted only about a quarter of an hour. The other was Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken I/60 symphony in C major. This symphony is known as “Il Distratto,” the Italian title of a play originally written in French, for which Haydn composed incidental music. As a result, the “symphony” is in six movements, accounting for an overture, four entr’actes, and a finale, which begins with the roaring dissonance of retuning in the string section.

None of the context of Haydn’s music figures in Clyne’s tone poem. Basically, she cherry-picked moments from the score that interested her and then wove them into a rhetoric of “skittish outbursts” (in the composer’s own words). The program book included a full page of background material, most of which was provided by Clyne herself. That was all distilled into a summary paragraph on the program page. If that were not enough, the audience got to listen to a recording of Clyne providing introductory remarks, which did little more than echo what she had already written.

What mattered most, however, was the intensely wild abandon of the overall rhetoric and the skills of the entire string section to provide a crisp and clear account of that rhetoric. Considering that the composer began to run out of ideas about halfway into her score, the precision of the string players was pretty much the high point of the performance. There is always a danger when a composer spends more time talking about the music than making it. Sadly, “Sound and Fury” succumbed to that danger.

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