This week’s San Francisco Symphony (SFS) concert in the Summer with the Symphony series saw the debut performance of conductor Paolo Bortolameolli. This conductor’s activities span our two connected continents. Here in California he is Associate Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. To the south he is Music Director of Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional Esperanza Azteca in Mexico. On the other side of the Panama Canal he is Principal Guest Conductor of Filarmónica de Santiago in Chile.
Ironically, his only Pan American offering was the “overture” for last night’s concert in Davies Symphony Hall. The program began with Aaron Copland’s “El Salón México.” Copland’s roots were pure Brooklyn, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. However, through his friend and fellow composer Carlos Chávez, he developed a taste for “south of the border” music. That acquired taste would lead to the score of “El Salón México,” weaving fragments of indigenous sources into his own rhetorical style. He confessed to Chávez that he might get taken to task for venturing beyond his own roots, so to speak; but when the music was first performed by the Orquesta Sinfónica de México (conducted by Chavez), both the audience and the ensemble were delighted with the results.
Bortolameolli could not have not a better job of capturing Copland’s spirit and delivering it to the Davies audience. He left no raucous stone unturned. Even for those familiar this music (present company included), he delivered one surprise after another, drawing upon the full spectrum of diverse sonorities coming from the SFS instrumentalists. This was a conductor who knew exactly how to draw audience attention from the very first gesture and maintain it all the way through to the final measure.
Those skills served him equally well in his “Strauss+Strauss” offering after the intermission. He began with the overture to the operetta Die Fledermaus (the bat) by Johann Strauss II. This was followed by a suite from Richard Strauss’ Opus 59 opera Der Rosenkavalier. There have been many suites extracted from this opera, and Bortolameolli chose to perform one prepared by Artur Rodziński, which he conducted with the New York Philharmonic in 1944.
Fledermaus is basically a comedy of infidelity, whose primary actions unfold in the context of a gala ball hosted by a decadent Eastern European prince. Most of the overture serves as a “warm-up” for the music one will hear during the ball scene. However it also reflects on the confusions that unfold as it emerges that everyone is being unfaithful to someone else. In other words, even when the music is at its most lyrical, there are always the sharp edges to those acts of infidelity; and the opera ends with a punchline that excuses all of those acts with the motto, “Blame it on the champagne.” Nevertheless, Strauss knew enough to keep this dark side out of his overture to lure the audience into his web, rather than scare them away from it; and Bortolameolli knew exactly how to keep the high spirits of all that champagne flowing through the entire musical introduction.
There is also no shortage of high spirits in Der Rosenkavalier, but the libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a far cry from the raucous turns of events in Fledermaus. There is a complexity in the fabric of the relationships across all of the members of the cast. One might say that the basic storyline involves the progress of a young man, who learns about sex from an older woman, eventually finds love with a younger one, and is now mature enough to lead her into marriage. While this is a rather positive account of progress, Hofmannsthal leaves us at the end of the opera speculating on the future of that older woman whose “boy toy” is no longer either boy or toy.
Rodziński’s suite of Strauss’ music amounts to an impressive effort to lead the listener through Hofmannsthal’s narrative. This was no easy effort, and the fact is that it was not much easier for the listener. Anyone familiar with the full opera (which has been given some thoroughly ravishing productions by San Francisco Opera) will find it easy to follow the suite through its account of the key episodes. Those that do not have the opera’s scenario as a point of reference may find themselves wondering how long the listening experience will be. Those that have read up to this sentence probably recognize my familiarity with the opera; and, with that familiarity in my knapsack, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed Bortolameolli’s interpretation of Rodziński’s score. However, I have to remind myself that Strauss’ music never really got to me until I had the opportunity to see the opera in a staged performance.
The only disappointment of the evening was the SFS premiere of Kevin Puts’ “Contact.” This was a triple concerto composed explicitly for the three musicians of Time for Three, violinists Nicolas Kendall and Charles Yang with Ranaan Meyer on bass. (All three of them also sing.) All of their instruments were amplified, which probably imposed serious challenges for any conductor if not also for the composer. Were it not for the fact that Puts deserves to be addressed as a serious composer (whose music has been performed in the past by SFS), I would suggest that, rather than “Contact,” the appropriate title for last night’s offering would have been “Hey, we’re playing with a symphony orchestra!”
Fortunately, the richness of the other three selections on the program easily erased any unpleasant memories of worrying about how much longer “Contact” would last; and, hopefully, Puts will be remembered for his more substantive achievements.
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