SF Symphony Chorus. April 11, 2010

The always-wonderful SF Symphony Chorus gave their annual "just us" concert this afternoon. The first half was all Swedish music, probably unknown to 99% of the audience; the second half had some of the Rachmaninoff Vespers and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, probably familiar to 99% of the audience, especially anyone who ever sang in a big chorus. Interesting extremes.

The opening piece, Let There Be, a creation formula for mixed choir and percussion, was written by Frederik Sixten, who was in the audience. I always applaud living composers, even when I'm not crazy about their pieces. This was the world premiere. The percussionist was Jack Van Geem, one of the SF Symphony's percussionists. He was kept quite busy, and did quite well, even though he was on crutches.

The piece has lots of tone-clusters, where the choir might be singing C, C#, D, D#, and E all at the same time. It's easy to lose your way as a listener and, I fear, as a singer. There were moments where the pitch was so uncertain, I thought the choir had aimed and missed. It wasn't microtonal, e.g., with pitches halfway between C and C#. Or perhaps it was, but they didn't sound very confident about it. Of course, this was "wet ink" music, so one expects a certain amount of struggling. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, only half the chorus sang the piece.

The next piece was Easy Listenin' compared to the first. It was Jorden oro viker by Ludvig Norman. Very pretty, with some moments that reminded me of Brahms.

While the chorus reshuffled themselves for the third time (was that really necessary?), Ragnar Bohlin, the director of the Chorus, told us what he liked about the next piece, called ... a riveder le stelle, by Ingvar Lindholm. I'm afraid I didn't like this piece at all. There's forte, and then there's just plain loud, and this had a lot of loud singing. The chorus was divided in 16 parts, and there was a lot more of this half-step-apart music that sounded like a disagreement about pitches. There was a solo part near the end, sung beautifully by Pamela Sebastian, but in some key unrelated to what the chorus was singing. Bohlin warned us that this piece was polytonal, but to pull that off, whether in a string quartet or a full-stage orchestra, you have to have nerves of steel and exude confidence. I didn't sense that here.

There were two more pieces on the first half, ending with a folksong that was supposed to be funny, perhaps a drinking song. It had a tenor soloist, Keith Perry, who was quite good but was so serious, we weren't sure whether the song really was funny. Some people just don't tell jokes very well.

After intermission, we heard six movements from the Rachmaninoff Vespers. The first one, Come, Let Us Worship (sung in Russian), restored our faith in humanity, tonality, and choral unity. Things went astray after that, however. Again, only a part of the choir sang. I wonder why; choirs love to sing this music, and I'll bet that everyone in the SF Symphony Chorus has sung the piece several times before. The sound was certainly in no danger of being too big, not in Davies. The mezzo soloist for this second movement was not up to the task. Fortunately, the tenor soloist in the fourth movement, Kevin Gibb, was terrific. The basses, or some of them at least, managed the incredible low B-flat at the end of the fifth movement, Lord, Now Lettest Thou Thy Servant Depart.

Two things bothered me about this performance of the Rachmaninoff. First, the chorus had their noses in their books. I can understand that for the Swedish pieces, but not for the Vespers. The Russian is not easy to learn, but the notes are. I was sitting upstairs; they were all looking down; the result was a muffled sound. 96 singers exclaiming Rejoice, O Virgin! should rock the hall. Second, I think the tempos were simply too fast. Many of the subtle chord shifts got lost. I know Davies doesn't have much reverberation, so you can't use the hall in the way you could use a big ol' stone church, but Bohlin could have done a lot more with tempo and dynamics. As you might guess, I've sung this piece several times, and I remember every note, so I really missed all those great crunchy passing notes and the occasional floor-shaking bass lines.

We got some floor-shaking in the last piece, Chichester Psalms, courtesy of Robert Huw Morgan at the Ruffatti organ. I've never heard this arrangement (with organ instead of orchestra), but it started with a bang, lots of reeds in the Pedal, very exciting. Morgan, who is the organist at Stanford, is a fine musician, but after the first few measures, I feared he would drown out the Chorus. My fears came true. He had interesting registrations (choices of organ stops), but he simply overpowered the chorus, especially the basses, who are no match for a 16' Diapason, let alone a Bombarde. (The name says it all.) All I can imagine is that they had only one rehearsal, it sounded good on stage, and they didn't send anyone out into the hall to check the balance.

In the blazing-fast, tongue-twisting Lamah rag'shu, the synchronization suffered. The percussionist was back, but he was at center stage, surrounded by singers. The pipes, however, are way up above everyone, and it just takes a while for sound to move. An organist will play a little ahead of the beat to compensate, but at this speed, and with all the reeds Morgan was using (they "speak" more slowly), it was a race (who's ahead now?). Believe it or not, there was a harpist on stage. Organ versus harp? No contest! She could have been practicing scales for all we knew.

The singing, the singing... The Chorus was fine. A few false entrances (here and elsewhere in the concert), but they projected the fun of a quick, vintage-Bernstein 7/8 meter near the beginning, and the practically Hawaiian slow 5/8 near the end. Zachary Weisberg was the boy soprano, a little rough around the edges, in the affected style that is now so popular with this role. The final movement is an a cappella chorale, and it was really nice to hear the chorus sing all by themselves for a few moments, lingering over those major-sevenths Bernstein loved so much. (His Mass ends in the same way.) The very last few bars are accompanied, alas, and even then, the organ was too loud.

There is probably an arrangement for piano instead of orchestra (or organ), and I think that would have worked much better. Earlier in the evening, we heard the Chorus' own pianist, Matthew Edwards, doing a great job with the rich accompaniment for Sven-Eric Johanson's Fancies II. I'm sure he would have done a great job with this piece, too: nicely percussive and quick, an occasional booming chord, but all in all, a better match. And we would have heard the harpist.

Stunning Shostakovich, SF Symphony. Friday, April 2, 2010

Shostakovich wrote the most beautiful miserable music in all of the 20th century. His Symphony No. 8 in C minor, Op. 65 (1943), was the major event of the evening. The San Francisco Symphony has never sounded better, and Vasily Petrenko, 34, was the finest guest conductor I think I've ever heard in Davies Hall.

Like many of Shostakovich's symphonies, this one is a long and winding journey through dissonance and stress, to moments of quiet beauty, to explosions of sound. It starts like the famous Fifth, with cellos versus violins, and if you missed the sense of foreboding in the opening of the first movement, you can't miss it in the ending: drum rolls, like distant thunder, warn us of the storm to come, and when it hits, we are swept into it.

When it comes to Shostakovich, the San Francisco Symphony has a secret weapon: Catherine Payne, the piccolo player. Just when you think the storm is in full fury, the piccolo enters, loud and very, very high, kicking it up a notch. When this movement ends, everyone, including the audience, is out of breath.

Not limited to special effects, Ms. Payne played a difficult but dazzling solo in the second movement. I'm sure it's a piccolo player's dream -- or nightmare -- but she played it perfectly, confidently. The other long solo was in the English horn, beautifully played by Russ deLuna. Pick your favorite depressing image: a cold, winter sunset; a lone, lost soldier; post-war grief. This is not tug-at-your-heartstrings sad, this is end-of-the-world sad.

For the music-theory fans, this piece has everything, including a passacaglia and a great fugue in the last movement. There were other solos, too: French horn (Nicole Cash), violin (concertmaster Alexander Barantshik), clarinet (Carey Bell), flute (Tim Day), and a spectacular moment -- and workout -- for the tympanist (David Herbert).

But the star of the performance was the conductor, who was in total control, yet let the players shine. He owns Shostakovich, in the same way that Michael Tilson Thomas owns Mahler, or Herbert Blomstedt owns Bruckner. Now, I've never seen this guy before, and for all I know, he actually prefers conducting Haydn, or Ravel. But from now on, when I think of Shostakovich, I will remember Vasily Petrenko and this night.

There's one more performance left. I might go back, if I can bear it.

The concert opened with the Grieg Piano Concerto in A minor, with Simon Trpčeski as the soloist. This piece is so familiar that no one ever listens to it. I wore out an LP with this and the Rachmaninoff Paganini Variations when I was in high school. (The pianist was the late, great Leonard Pennario.) It's been easily a decade since I heard it live. Too bad, because even though I thought I remembered every note from that recording, I'd apparently forgotten a few. This was a thoughtful performance, not flashy.

At many spots in this piece, Grieg writes giant, two-fisted chords that also include booming octaves in the bass, which you have to play a split second before the beat, ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom. The trouble is that you really want that bass note to be loud, since the whole chord is built on it, but playing those notes with the left hand and then zipping over to play the left fist of the two-fisted chord is hard if you want both power and accuracy. Trpčeski played with accuracy but with less power than I wanted. The performance was a crowd-pleaser, as expected.

The pianist took rather long bows, and for an encore, he played a short piece (also by Grieg, I think) that he said he learned when he was 7 years old. I suspect most piano students don't master this piece until they're, oh, 10 or 11. I thought it was inappropriate fluff.

I have to wonder how many people came to hear the short, "easy" Grieg and were not prepared for the long, "difficult" Shostakovich. (What the heck was that?) But maybe there were some converts who came for the appetizer but were very happy they stayed for the main course.