Last night Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) returned to Davies Symphony Hall to lead the San Francisco Symphony in the third of the four subscription programs he prepared. The program presented two early compositions by Claude Debussy, one of the sixteen Chôros compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos, and an adventurous cantata by Olivier Messiaen. MTT may have planned his program on a theme of “exploration and discovery;” but, for the most part, the performances of those selections barely registered with attentive listening and tended to fizzle long before the final measures would emerge.
The boldest selection was probably Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine (three short liturgies of the Divine Presence). This involved an impressive diversity of instrumentation, since the string section was joined only by a solo piano (Jean-Yves Thibaudet), a solo ondes Martenot (Cynthia Millar), a celesta, a percussion section consisting of Chinese cymbals, maracas, tam-tam, and vibraphone, and a chorus of sopranos and altos. Most of the percussion instruments were at their usual rear location, but Jacob Nissly’s vibraphone was situated between the piano and the ondes Martenot.
During the intermission, several members of the audience headed to the edge of the stage to get a look at the ondes Martenot, and Millar generously provided them with an introduction to the instrument. That explanatory encounter may have been more engaging than the music itself. Messiaen provided his own text for the chorus. This may have been an intimate confession of his Catholic devotion, but the union of music with the text tended to involve a limited vocabulary of motifs that were repeated too many times. This could easily have been an act of intense religious devotion; but, as a concert experience, the 40-minute composition overstayed its welcome long before the halfway mark.
Following the intermission Thibaudet returned to perform Claude Debussy’s three-movement “Fantaisie,” scored for piano and orchestra. This is a relatively early composition, completed in 1890. This music was never performed during the composer’s lifetime. The first soloist was Alfred Cortot, playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on November 20, 1919. The full score would not be published until 1920. Regrettably, last night’s performance never really registered, perhaps explaining why Debussy himself never felt that the score had been completed to his satisfaction. (He apparently worked on a second version after 1910.) More successful was the more familiar opening to the concert, Debussy’s “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune,” which was composed in 1894. For all of its brevity, this was the most engaging listening experience of the evening.
A small chocalho (photograph by Qniemiec, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
The Villa-Lobos selection was “Chôros No. 10,” one of the few to be given a title, “Rasga o coração” (it tears your heart). The Wikipedia page for the Chôros compositions lists the instrumentation as follows: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, 2 timpani, tam-tam, tambourine, tambor, caxambu (named after a Brazilian river), 2 puítas, surdo, drums, reco-reco (large and small), chocalhos (shakers, see above) de metal e de madeira, piano, harp, strings. Most of the unfamiliar words refer to Brazilian instruments from the percussion family. The performance amounted to about twelve minutes of energetic rhythms and diverse sonorities; but here, again, the execution of the score never seemed to register.
By the end of the evening, one felt the experience of a promising program that never really lived up to its promise.
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