Some of my fondest Halloween memories involve going to Davies Symphony Hall to see a holiday-appropriate silent movie with live organ accompaniment. This year, however, San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen prepared a full-length subscription program. I am happy to report that both the works he selected for the program and the performances of those works fired on all cylinders, running the gamut from darkly sinister to comically grotesque.
HK Gruber (photograph by Johnny Volcano, from the booklet for his Chandos album)
The latter filled the second half of the program with a performance of a composition by Heinz Karl Gruber (who prefers to be known as “HK Gruber”) with the full title “Frankenstein!! a pan-demonium for chansonnier and orchestra after children’s rhymes by HC Artmann.” Gruber himself served as chansonnier delivering Artmann’s German texts with the BBC Philharmonic for a Chandos album recorded in 2017. Last night Harriet Watts’ English translations of those texts were delivered by Christopher Purves as chansonnier. The score required that he supplement his vocal work with toy instruments, which were also provided to many of the players in the large instrumental ensemble. The English texts were also projected, allowing attentive listeners to relish every last absurd grotesquerie that Artmann had devised.
The result was probably the most raucous event I have ever experienced in Davies. Considering that it came on the heels of the no-holds-barred performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 522 (“A Musical Joke”) at last Sunday’s SFS Chamber Music program, complete with powdered wigs, eighteenth-century finery, and an abundance of physical comedy, the use of that adjective “raucous” was definitely put to the test. (The full complement of SFS musicians and their “auxiliary toys” definitely outnumbered the sextet playing the Mozart selection.) As they say about comedy, “Timing is everything;” and Salonen clearly knew how to coordinate the timing of every off-beat gesture in Gruber’s score, allowing Purves full liberty in his approaches to delivering Artmann’s wacky texts. The only thing that seemed to be missing was a percussion part for things that go bump in the night.
The first half of the program was far darker than Gruber’s antics. Salonen chose to begin with Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra.” Pretty much everyone knows the intense impact of Herrmann’s music for the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, but very few know that the entire score for the movie was composed only for strings. Following the success of the film in 1960, Herrmann prepared an edition of the score for concert performance in 1968. This version was recorded but then lost. It was subsequently reconstructed by John Mauceri in the early 2000s, and that is the version that SFS performed last night. (Unless I am mistaken, it had previously been performed here in May of 2009 by the New Century Chamber Orchestra led by Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.) The score itself was structured in multiple movements, but these were not indicated in the program book. Also, there was a reprise of the shower scene music in last night’s performance that I did not recall from the 2009 offering.
The Herrmann score was followed by the suite that Béla Bartók extracted from the music he composed for the brutal and erotic ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin.” Like “Frankenstein!!,” this score utilized the full forces of the SFS ensemble but without the toy instruments, which would have undermined the profound darkness of both the ballet narrative and the music itself. This was the second Bartók offering of the month, the first having taken place two weeks ago, when Salonen conducted the “Concerto for Orchestra." Salonen clearly enjoys conducting Bartók’s music, particularly when the score requires him to “pull out all the stops.” However, the “Mandarin” score is far darker than the concerto, which, for the most part, is more playful. Because his selection was a suite, the music does not strictly follow the narrative of the ballet itself, preferring instead to highly the dark personal qualities that drive that narrative to its haunting conclusion (which is not included in the suite). Once again, the “physical” experience of listening to this Bartók score rose way above any previous encounter with a recording.
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