Morlot’s Stimulating Account of Warhorses

San Francisco Symphony Visiting Conductor Ludovic Morlot (photograph by Lisa Maria Mazzucco, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony)

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony presented a Summer with the Symphony program that really got the juices flowing. The ensemble was led by Ludovic Morlot, last seen in Davies this past November when he shared the podium with Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas. Morlot was also one of the conductors that contributed to the Centennial Season, leading two programs performed by the visiting Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ironically, this took place at the beginning of his tenure as Music Director of the Seattle Symphony. Now he has become their Conductor Emeritus as he moves on to serve as Music Director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and National Orchestra of Catalonia.

The soloist on the program that Morlot had prepared was pianist Inon Barnatan, performing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 43 “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Both soloist and conductor knew how to pull out all the stops for a rip-snorting account of music that tends to run the risk of being too familiar. Most important was that both conductor and soloist realized just how playful Rachmaninoff had been in creating this composition, and that sense of humor threw a new and refreshing light on all the technical challenges that the pianist had to surmount. Thus, as the episodes (most of which were variations) unfolded, a listener could be forgiven for the occasional grin, followed by cracking a smile, and erupting into a belly laugh at the conclusion of the final measure. Yet those gags could only emerge by virtue of the many ways in which both Morlot and Barnatan teased out details that go unnoticed in more mediocre performances.

Barnatan kept the spirits high with his encore selection. This was an account of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which was probably the version in Earl Wild’s Virtuoso Etudes after Gershwin. This music was over the top in its technical demands, but Barnatan glided through every challenging turn of phrase as if it were as easy as falling off a log.

He may have made his encore choice knowing that the second half of the program would celebrate the friendship that formed between Gershwin and Maurice Ravel. In that context the first selection was Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” which bubbled over with all the excitement of an enthusiastic tourist, pausing only a few times to catch his/her breath or linger over a few brief thoughts of home. The program then concluded with Ravel’s “Boléro.” This turned out to be a highly disciplined account of what Ravel probably had in mind, the ways in which a single tune can assume a wide variety of dispositions, each reflecting different instrumental sonorities. This is music that only really registers on the strength of its details, and Morlot knew exactly how to give a clear and convincing account of every one of them.

The program began with the West Coast premiere of Gabriella Smith’s “Tidalwave Kitchen.” The composer was on hand to introduce her composition. She explained that she had written it during her undergraduate studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, a time when she was very homesick for Northern California.

The work was written for a very large ensemble, which displayed an understanding of all of the instruments and the ways in which their sonorities can be blended. Nevertheless, it is beginning to feel as if these “overtures” in Davies by young composers all seem to be exercises in large-scale instrumentation that often run out of steam after the requisite combinations of sonorities have been explored. While I appreciate the need to provide the new generation of composers with platforms for their creations, I am beginning to wonder whether there is a paucity of inventiveness behind many of those creations.