SYMPHONY REVIEW: SF Symphony
Not Mozart
By Michelle Dulak Concertgoers unsympathetic to new music often complain of programs that slip an unfamiliar new work in among a collection of beloved old favorites. There is a suspicion that the musicians are presuming to tell the audience whats good for it, forcing it to swallow the new piece as the price of the assured pleasures of the old ones. I doubt that the San Francisco Symphonys oddly unfocused program of Friday evening was designed with any such pedagogical intent, but in the event, it was about as good an argument for the practice as could be made. The music-lover who knows Pierre Boulez only by reputation likely has a picture of a fearsome and cold figure, an autocrat and a dogmatist, whose icily controlled conducting persona is mirrored in his abstruse and formidably complex music. The overwhelming impression produced by the Symphonys performance of Boulezs four "Notations for Orchestra," though, was of the opulence and even sensuality of his orchestration. The dominant theme of the two slow pieces was resonancean enveloping cloud of sound that had its source in the enormous battery of tuned percussion and the three harps, but worked its way out somehow into the strings and winds. The orchestra seemed not a collection of individual players or even sections, but a single, slowly shifting, multicolored object. The fast movements, placed second and fourth, were very different in character but equally vivid, their jagged, rhythmically irregular lines careening through the orchestra with ferocious energy. Guest conductor Sylvain Cambreling led the slow pieces with delicacy, the fast ones with a bizarre and disturbing jerkiness of gesture that, from the audience perspective, provided a grotesquely appropriate visual counterpart to the music, but cannot have been terribly helpful to the orchestra. Be that as it may, the performance was thrilling, timbrally exquisite in the slow music and tight in ensemble in the rhythmically demanding second and fourth pieces. | |
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