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Return to regular viewS.F. Symphony brings clarity, passionate abandon to Sibelius' Fifth
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Friday, February 27, 2004
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Those potent, streamlined chords that filled Davies Symphony Hall on Wednesday night were the sound of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony putting the cap on a richly evocative performance of Sibelius' Fifth Symphony. It's the sort of sound we could stand to hear even more often.
Throughout the course of this symphony -- by turns knotty and heroically plain-spoken -- the orchestra was in top form, playing with utmost technical control and expressive abandon. And Thomas, beginning a three- week home stint with the orchestra before their East Coast tour together, seemed energized and deeply engaged with the music at hand.
The result was a wonderful and persuasive account of a work that needs passionate advocacy from everyone concerned to make its full impact. For all the instrumental splendor of Sibelius' writing, from the delicate chamber textures of the slow movement to the oracular, brass-dominated finale, the Fifth can be a difficult score to fully make sense of.
That's especially true in the first movement, which telescopes the traditional functions of a first movement and a scherzo into a single stretch of music. Distinctive harmonies and melodic figures appear and reappear in different guises, and the characteristically willful formal plan only underlines the music's evasiveness.
Yet under Thomas' firm, fluid guidance, the music unfolded with extraordinary clarity. A listener could hear the composite movement expanding from the feints and jabs of the opening into the bold, clean lines of the scherzo.
And the latter two movements sounded even more excitingly direct, crowned by some of the orchestra's most vibrant playing. The slow movement opened in blissful serenity, with woodwind melodies over gently pizzicato strings, and grew in intensity without losing that sense of grace. The finale was thrilling, grand but never pompous.
The program began with two choral works by San Francisco's own Gordon Getty, both of them recorded live for release on the PentaTone Classics label. "Annabel Lee," a short, chiaroscuro-laden setting of Poe's poem of young love, has been done here before.
A newer and more ambitious offering was "Young America," a six-part song cycle written in 2001 to mostly original verse. This proved to be a sort of neo-Carl Sandburg deal, launched by exhortations to admire the breadth and scope of the nation ("Hark the Homeland") and continuing with some intimate and even sentimental offerings.
Getty's musical language is resolutely staid, which saps the score of some of the Ivesian energy it could use. But there is plenty of lovely writing, particularly in an original folk-song ("Heather Mary") whose blend of English and American melodic strains deftly straddles the Atlantic.
Wednesday's performance, however, may not be the best basis for a recording. Thomas and the orchestra seemed distracted and out of sync with one another, although there were fine solos by concertmaster Nadya Tichman in the orchestral War Interlude and English hornist Julie Ann Giacobassi in "Heather Mary." Even the singing of Vance George's Symphony Chorus sounded wan and loosely focused.
In between, concertmaster Alexander Barantschik offered a genteel but oddly low-wattage account of Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3. Here, too, one had the sense that Thomas' mind was elsewhere (presumably on the Sibelius) -- he began the first movement at a slow tempo, then sped up suddenly when it was time for Barantschik's first entrance.
And Barantschik was restrained almost to a fault, playing sweetly and
precisely but suggesting little of the extroverted, virtuosic glee that makes
a concerto a concerto. The sublimely songlike slow movement proved the high
point of the performance.
San Francisco Symphony: The subscription program repeats at 8 p.m. today and Saturday in Davies Symphony Hall. Tickets: $30-$97. Call (415) 864-6000 or go to www.sfsymphony.org.
E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.