Entertaining Premiere, Impressive Revival
13-year Old Pianist Ji-Yong Breezes
Through Concerto With Aplomb
by Robert Commanday
San Francisco Classical Voice,
April 17, 2004
It was doubtless a happy relief in these bad-news times for the Santa Rosa Symphonys audience Saturday to discover that the evenings premiere was not a forbidding challenge, but something light, lively and likeable, an entertainment. With Jeffrey Kahane conducting a bright, cohesive performance, Kenji Bunchs Symphony No. 1,
"Lichtenstein Triptych," turned out to be a pops piece. That might have been predicted, given that the work had been based on the late Roy Lichtensteins paintings,
"Varoom!," "We Rose Up Slowly," and "The Car."
Indeed, there have been distinguished works created about paintings
Mussorgsky, Hindemith, and Gunther Schuller come to mind. Not this time. The comics-style visualizations, a form of parody immediately recognized as
Lichtenstein, were not, in Bunjis piece, parodied in a musical manner distinct from a lot of music in the general stream of things. There were pops, clicks, bangs and whams in
"Varoom!," to be sure, in a syncopated,
jazzish-but-not-jazzy current. Its been done by Leonard Bernstein most impressively. The shadow of West Side Story and Candide falls heavily over this entire work, right up to the Latin rhythm and percussion
cha-chaing in the last movement, presumably over "The Car"s radio.
And its been done by Ravel, the creation of a kind of impressionist, side-slipping texture with harmony based on augmented triads, on which Bunch acknowledges his first movement is based. Its been done by innumerable song writers and composers for film and TV, the sumptuous, neo-romantic scoring. This one features a long solo line for the violas, followed by one for solo violin (associate concertmaster Jeanelle Meyer) backed up by horn, then clarinet. That occurred in the dreamy love-scene movement, "We Rose Up Slowly." Whatever "Bernstein," "Ravel," "Studio music" the audience loved it, giving Bunch, Kahane and the orchestra and their clean, bright performance a grand hurrah.
"Recontextualize" or assimilate
In his program note, Bunch declared that his goal as a composer was "to recontextualize vernacular musical idioms for the concert hall." That, too, is not exactly new, except that when the great composers did it, they didnt
"recontextualize," they assimilated the idioms into their own musical language and spoke through that. Thats serious composing.
Bunchs Symphony No. 1 was the second composition to be commissioned and performed in the Magnum Opus project created and sponsored by the Silicon Valley philanthropist Kathryn Gould in collaboration with the Santa Rosa, Marin, and Oakland East Bay Symphonies and in association with Meet the Composer. Before it is completed, the three orchestras will have played nine Gould-commissioned works.
The Santa Rosa Symphonys concertmaster, Joseph
Edelberg, stepped up to the plate as soloist in the remarkable but too infrequently played Violin Concerto No 1 by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937). Its an extraordinary and beautiful work by any measure, composed in 1916. Concurrent with the great works by Stravinsky and Schoenberg of that period, it too finds a bridge into the modern era, not as dramatically but in its own way.
Karol Szymanowski
Szymanowskis concerto begins in shimmering, atmospheric music, like a vision, a fantasy; and very gradually, the music probes deeper and darker, while the violin remains in its high range, singing above the richly colored texture of the orchestra. Like Bartks music, Szymanowskis has its own language, the violin playing an ornate but lyric role against a richly-colored background, the harmony redolent of his distinctive impressionism. The expressiveness is strong, the style independent, the music conveying a special eloquence. It is in one continuous movement, the violin leading but not dominant, as the fantasy evolves.
Edelbergs playing was refined and searching; with thorough command of the music, he unfurled the coiling violin melody, often chromatic, as the central line of the work. The notoriously absorbent acoustics of the Luther Burbank Center (and Edelbergs not finding the most advantageous location on the stage, the sweet spot) resulted in some containment of his tone, so that the singing qualities of his line were not as pervasive as the role required. But his playing was warm and communicative. Kahane had the orchestra producing the special sonority and radiance of Szymanowskis distinctive score in an involving performance. The neglect of Szymanowskis music is a shame, and some sense of the extent of what we are missing may be found here.
After intermission, Kahane conducted Beethovens Symphony No 3,
"Eroica," in a propelling, fluid, and secure performance. Kahanes focus on the melodious qualities, phrasing and line, however, trumped bite in the first two movements. There is an edge essential to bringing out the daring in the conflict between the drama and the lyricism in the
"Eroica" the extensions, the harmonic surprises that fundamentally changed the concept of the sonata form and created an heroic style. (The famous subtitle has more significance musically than anecdotally.)
The gravitas is not there
Slightly slower tempos in the first movement would have helped the musicians direct their attention to the detail that makes the difference. Also in the second movement,
"Marche funbre," at Kahanes tempo, dotted rhythms slip by too easily; the compelling gravitas is simply not there. No one digs in. The problem is that we are so familiar with this music (and so much else since), that the strength and impact of the musical events in this once-radical music the character and the power are hard to perceive today unless very conscious efforts are made to sharpen them in the performance. The two succeeding movements went excellently.
The Santa Rosa Symphony is playing well good the last time I heard it, much better last weekend. The horn section is vastly improved, the woodwinds cohesive and tuned together, the strings more consistent and unified. Two problems emerged, however. The placement of the horns at the top level of the risers, the bells of their instruments close to the wall, insures that they will overbalance and stick out some of the time, often with mere harmony notes, the musics underwear. The timpanist is allowed to explode startlingly when he sees a forte indication, and he maintained too high and distracting a sonic presence, primarily in the Beethovens first movement. Typically for American orchestras, there is not the tact and discretion the style demands for horns, percussion and, though not in this performance, the other brass. Everything that happens in the Luther Burbank Center cant be blamed on its poor acoustics; a lot can be controlled. But surely the move to the Green Center will enable the orchestra to make a quantum leap.
(Robert P. Commanday, the senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
2004 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved
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