Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts took place in the summer of 1963. This would have been the interval between my graduation from high school and my freshman entry to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At that time the only building that had opened was Philharmonic Hall, and I visited it only a couple of times. Since those times were in the summer, I never attended a performance by the New York Philharmonic.
The New York Philharmonic rehearsing on the stage of the Wu Tsai Theater (photograph by Chris Lee, courtesy of the New York Philharmonic, from a New York YIMBY article)
Given the nature of my classmates, it did not take long to word to spread across the MIT community that Philharmonic Hall was an acoustic nightmare. In the decades that followed, it seemed as if the space would never achieve satisfactory acoustics. This past October introduced the public to the latest effort in a space now called the Wu Tsai Theater in a building named David Geffen Hall.
It should come as no surprise that Public Television would create a video document of opening night at the Wu Tsai Theater. About a week ago I watched the video I had saved when that video was broadcast here in San Francisco. Ironically, every panoramic shot of the New York Philharmonic playing in their renovated home showed a bevy of microphones hanging from the ceiling. I naturally assumed that these were for the telecast, but they also served to remind me that broadcast television was definitely not the medium to address the question of whether or not acoustics had been improved.
As a result, the best I could do was to try to account for performance technique and the chemistry between the ensemble and the conductor, Music Director Jaap van Zweden. Most of the program consisted of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 125 (“Choral”) symphony in D minor. However, this was preceded by “You Are the Prelude,” a setting of a text by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado composed by Angélica Negrón on a New York Philharmonic commission.
One of the outstanding virtues of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) is its commitment to bringing new compositions into the repertoire. Sometimes it feels as if every concert I tend in Davies Symphony Hall provides an opportunity to listen to a new work. That feeling may not be quite accurate (particularly in light of this week’s all-Brahms program); but it is still very satisfying.
As a result, when I learned about Negrón’s commission, my immediate question was: “How many of her works have I encountered here?” It turns out that my most recent encounter was this past August, when SFS performed the West Coast premiere of “Fractal Isles.” Yes, the title appealed to the mathematician in me; but that was almost insignificant thanks to a rich abundance of instrumental sonorities supplemented with field recordings of sounds of a tropical rainforest.
In that context the experience of listening to “You Are the Prelude” was more that a little bit on the weak side. This may have been a result of working with New Yorkers, it may have been that van Zweden never quite “got” the score, or it may be a combination of many factors. Whatever the case, it was hard to overlook the feeling that we had gotten the better deal in San Francisco!
Mind you, the factor that dare not speak its name is the one that chose to load most of the attention on the Beethoven selection. Nevertheless, based on the camera views of the conductor, it was hard to shake the impression that he was giving a business-as-usual account. Mind you, the listening experience was seriously blunted by a video director who never seemed to have the right camera pointing in the right direction. As a result, everything cruised along with a relatively dull delivery until the score had progressed to the point at which a seriously enormous chorus had the opportunity to sign their lungs out. That was enough to wind up the entire program with a valid sense of exhilaration, even if t
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