Reviews: Transition and New Energies in SR

Transition And New International Energies In Santa Rosa

by Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music. Week of Jan. 22-29, Vol. 9, No. 57

(Santa Rosa)—There’s moving and shaking going on in the fast-growing redwood-&-wine country 60 miles north of San Francisco.

The Santa Rosa Symphony boasts a new French music director who replaces the popular institution Jeffrey Kahane, a new hall under construction a few miles down the freeway, and some lively repertory by—egads, what is this??? —living composers!!

Happy to say, an all-modern concert deterred no one in the near-sold out Sunday matinee of Jan. 21. The staples, if you want to call them that, were “American in Paris” and the “West Side Story” Symphonic Dances, offsetting two 21st-century pieces, no less, by imaginative Chinese-American composers.

Composer Tan Dun, who turns 50 this year, has something in common with Verdi, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, and Stravinsky: great successes along with spectacular failures. Tan Dun recently had the debacle of the year with his world-premiere opera at the Met, The First Emperor. Fortunately, he has also had great hits, none more so than the Oscar-winning score to the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Out of this he fashioned a marvelous programmatic work for orchestra and cello, the “Crouching Dragon Concerto” (2000), a lengthy but effective piece bringing the Santa Rosa crowd to its feet.

38 minutes, six movements: This is an ambitious piece, episodic, and theatrical. Tan Dun is brilliant in bringing out unusual sound textures, even with his scaled-down orchestra (no brass, and just one flute/piccolo woodwind). He retains elements of Chinese music, like occasional pentatonic scales or melismas, and modern orchestral gestures like rapid glissandi, and a constant chatter of percussion. There’s a big part on “tar” (hand-struck drum, done by Ward Spangler), and for the wind player mimicking the high-pitched Chinese flute. But the focus is unmistakably on the immense solo part for cello, originally composed for Yo-Yo Ma, now played with passionate conviction by Maya Beiser. Unlike most concerti rising to a concluding climax, this ends in an elegiac fadeout called “Farewell”—more effective in the movie than on stage.

Tan Dun’s inventiveness here, and his astute writing for percussion, were memorable. My only caveat was the amplification of the solo cello, altering the sound textures and eroding some of the acoustic experience that draws us into the live concert venues.

Of course the hall—formerly a religious meeting hall, then the Luther Burbank Center, and now renamed the Wells Fargo Center—is not the most responsive acoustically, and is much of the reason that a true symphony hall is now being built in nearby Rohnert Park.

The concert opened with Tibetan Swing (2002) by Bright Sheng, 51. Like Tan Dun, he was born in China and lives in the USA. His nine-minute work was a mood piece of contrasts, like a east-west kaleidoscope, starting in the deepest registers and opening up with rhythmic ideas more than melodic ones, in part recalling a mountain dance from Tibet, where Sheng was exiled during the harsh days of the Cultural Revolution. That he has fulfilled his great promise as a composer is doubly astonishing in light of the years of lost schooling during that difficult period when almost all schools except doctrinational ones were shut down.

I liked his deliberately raw brass sounds, the raucous effects mimicking eastern double-reeds, and tricky metric shifts suggesting even syncopation.

The new music director from Paris, Bruno Ferrandis, 46, appears to pattern his podium manner after the young Michael Tilson Thomas, down his super-trim custom-made black tunic, duck-cut hair and flamboyant movement. He tends to exaggerate movements, using broad gestures of both body and baton even in the quieter moments. But, apart from some hyperactive timpani, he had a good control over Gershwin’s An American in Paris, which is after all much more American than it is French.

Ferrandis may be subject to the typical first-year phenomenon of too-anxious-to-please, in Gershwin dwelling gingerly on subtler segments of the piece, or too formally on the sassy New York jazziness. He closed out with Bernstein’s West Side Story Symphonic Dances.

This was the second of three sets Ferrandis is leading here this season, out of eight triple concert sets plus a benefit night

Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.