I returned to the United States, after living in Singapore for about five years, to work in the new Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory on the northern edge of Silicon Valley. Unless I am mistaken, I purchased San Francisco Opera subscription tickets for my wife and I even before we left Singapore. We arrived in time for the beginning of the season in September of 1995, and we have been subscribers ever since then.
Readers probably know by now that, when I go to the War Memorial Opera House, I am as involved with what is happening in the orchestra pit as with what is happening on stage. As a result, it did not take me long to become acquainted with Donald Runnicles’ conducting technique; and I became more and more interested in his work the more I encountered it. Runnicles left his position at the San Francisco Opera in 2008, but he has made return visits since then. I have tried to keep up with them, and the most recent is currently taking place in Davies Symphony Hall.
For his visit to the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) this week, Runnicles prepared a program with Alban Berg in the first half and Gustav Mahler in the second. Both of the works represented the composers at the beginning of their respective careers. The earlier of these was Mahler’s first symphony in D major, composed in 1888 and revised in 1906. The first half of the program was devoted to Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs, composed for piano and voice in 1908 and orchestrated in 1928. The vocalist for the performances was mezzo Irene Roberts.
Berg’s approach to orchestration was as rich as Mahler’s and decidedly more adventurous. The second of the songs was scored only for string quartet, harp, and bass, while instrumentation for the fifth song involved only winds. Since Runnicles is no stranger to vocalists, he knew exactly how to balance Roberts’ voice against the rich palette of sonorities in Berg’s score.
The songs themselves were originally composed for piano accompaniment when Berg was studying under Arnold Schoenberg in 1905. They were not orchestrated until after Berg had developed his own techniques for vocal composition in his Wozzeck opera. With those techniques under his belt, so to speak, he could find just the right instrumental coloration for each of the seven songs. Runnicles knew exactly how to elicit all of those colors from the SFS ensemble, always blending perfectly with the vast scope of dispositions in Roberts’ delivery of the texts.
Photograph of Gustav Mahler by Leonard Berlin (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
I found it interesting that the revised version of Mahler’s symphony should predate Berg’s undertaking by so few years. What makes this pairing interesting is that both compositions have prodigious rhetorical breadth. In Mahler’s case, however, it feels as if the rhetoric swings from one extreme to another. Furthermore, regardless of what any individual disposition may be, there is always a recognizable undercurrent of irony. Runnicles knew how to keep that undercurrent flowing, whether it involved a funeral march in a warped version of “Frére Jacques” or the thunder and lightning in the final (“Stürmisch”) movement.
Taken as a whole, this was a program that kept the conductor busy from beginning to end. It also called for expressiveness with operatic roots. (Remember, Mahler was Director of the Vienna Court Opera when he was working on his first symphony.) Who better to allow those roots to flourish in the concert hall than a conductor (like Mahler) with experience in performing opera? It may be early in the season, but I suspect that Runnicles’ visit will remain a memorable one.
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