San Francisco Symphony. March 5, 2010

They were 1 for 4 tonight. Three mediocre pieces and one winner. All four were played well, of course. The concert opened with the world premiere of Post-scriptum by Victor Kissine. Wet ink: the piece is dated 2010. I applauded the composer when he came out to take a bow, but only because I think all composers should be applauded, at least the ones that get this far. I didn’t enjoy the piece, however. It sounded like movie music, but there are far better composers in Hollywood. I recently heard Jim Svejda interview Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score for Sherlock Holmes. Banjo versus orchestra. I’d much rather have heard 15 minutes of that. The Kissine piece had all sorts of musical effects, and there was nothing offensive about it. It cites The Unanswered Question, by Charles Ives, building up strange chords from always-strange Ives. But even that sounded ... familiar. I told Chris it sounded like movie music. "Yes," he replied, "from a horror movie." Exactly.

Then Christian Tetzlaff came out and played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, every note of which is well-known to audiences, except the whole middle movement, which is quiet, lovely, and deserves to be remembered. What I liked most was that Tetzlaff, who’s 44, has played this piece for a long time, so what came out was the music, not just all those terrifying notes. How many times have we seen teenage prodigies tackle this piece and wow the crowd with technique? That’s fun, too, but this was better. Risk the notes for the song.

Musical imprinting story: I’m sure I heard this piece when I was in high school, but the first performance I remember was when I was in college or grad school, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg played this piece with the New Haven Symphony. She was the new star on the musical scene. She strode out onto the stage in Woolsey Hall, wearing a gold dress with "big shoes." (Platform heels? I don’t know from shoes.) All nervous energy. A tigress. She held her violin by the neck and paced back and forth waiting for her entrance, which is several bars into the piece. I thought she was going to whack the conductor with her violin if he didn’t speed it up. The audience was all tittering at the costume, the pacing, and those shoes! Who was this person? And then she put bow to string ... and the tittering stopped. OMG, she can Really Play. The first movement has a big-bang ending, and the crowd went wild. Me, too. I totally forgot that it was just the first movement.

Back to tonight. After the intermission we heard Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, which didn’t grab me. I kept wishing for La Valse. The program finished with Liszt’s Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo. Wow. I didn’t know Liszt could write such bad music. There were some big-brass chords straight out of Les Preludes, note for note, I’ll bet. But the piece wanders through a jungle of diminished-seventh chords and so-called Tristan chords, made famous by his son-in-law Richard Wagner. When it finally lands somewhere, there was so much percussion that it drowned out the chord. Indeed, the cymbal crashes come early and often. There’s a big tune in the middle, repeated at the end (presumably the trionfo), and I was shocked at the clumsy harmonic progressions. Was he breaking new ground, or just breaking first-year music-theory rules that are there for a reason? Whatever he was trying, it didn’t catch on.

Michael Tilson Thomas conducted both of these last two pieces a year ago. I guess he liked them well enough to bring them out again. Or perhaps he just wanted an easier week: one wet-ink piece to work on, one warhorse to review, and two B-list pieces from recent memory. I expect never to hear the Kissine piece again. I hope never to hear the Ravel or Liszt again. (OK, the Ravel, on the radio, while working.)

Our usual group of 6 had dinner at Absinthe beforehand. I love the roasted beets appetizer. I’m sorry to see Citizen Cake go. I hope some equally worthy restaurant opens in its place, if only to have an alternative to Absinthe (often noisy and crowded) and Jardiniere ($$$). Actually, my friends would get bored, but I’d be happy to have all my pre-Symphony dinners in the Wattis Room.