Over the past month, San Francisco Symphony has performed a series of concerts with renowned guest conductors and soloists from far and wide. The most recent of these featured the symphony’s own former music director Herbert Blomstedt in a performance of Bruckner’s Second Symphony as well as Lutos&0000322;awski’s Piano Concerto with soloist Krystian Zimerman.
In the preceding concert of the series, guest conductor Fabio Luisi joined forces with violinist Joshua Bell in music by Strauss, Saint-Saëns, Ravel, and Schmidt.
A Familiar Face at Davies Hall
On Nov. 1, San Francisco Symphony welcomed back its decade-long music director Herbert Blomstedt, who left his post in 1995 in favor of Hamburg’s NDR Symphony Orchestra. Despite his advanced age, the 81-year-old conductor was every bit as energetic and expressive as the public remembers him during his distinguished former tenure in San Francisco.
The program’s opening piece was the 1986 Piano Concerto by Witold Lutos&0000322;awski, which was written for and dedicated to its present soloist, Polish-born Krystian Zimerman. The two allegedly met in 1975 when the 17-year-old Zimerman won the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw while Lutos&0000322;awski served as a judge.
The four-movement concerto was a remarkable piece, symbolizing many of the underlying principles of late 20th century music, among them the element of chance as it appears in nature. In fact, the entire composition seems to evoke natural, organic sounds such as those of a swarm of bees or a flock of birds among others. In some instances, the score calls for the strings to be bowed passed the bridge, or to play open-string overtones.
As the composition’s centerpiece, the very challenging piano part is required to produce virtually every conceivable sound effect short of internal preparation, all of which Zimerman executed with striking skill and insight. Many of the musical gestures written for the piano resemble the delicate, ethereal chromatic runs found in the works of Chopin and Liszt; only here, they continue to drift until they are abandoned with no tonal resolution.
A product of the rebellious musical thought of the last century, Lutos&0000322;awski’s concerto could be considered more intellectual than musical, yet it still managed to deeply impress the audience whose thunderous applause continued well into intermission. It was a pleasant surprise to witness such an ecstatic reaction by the general public—often faulted by musicians for its conservative artistic tastes.
The evening’s final piece was Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 2, composed in 1872, apparently in the midst of a heated ideological war in Vienna between Wagnerians and all others. The performance of this work was clearly a labor of love for Blomstedt, who conducted the entire 80-minute symphony from memory.
Anton Bruckner is generally numbered among the under-appreciated composers of the late Romantic period, whose works were likely eclipsed by the giants of Vienna’s concert halls, namely Wagner and Mahler. Bruckner is also said to have been an easy target for the particularly mean-spirited—albeit influential—music critic of the time, Eduard Hanslick, who may have dealt a fatal blow to the composer’s already weakened career and reputation. Be that as it may, in Anton Bruckner’s music, one can clearly hear the symphonic echoes of the single most important composer ever to set foot in Vienna: Ludwig van Beethoven.
The Best of Both Worlds
San Francisco Symphony’s Oct. 24 concert featured musical talent from both sides of the Atlantic, bringing together European conductor Fabio Luisi and American violinist Joshua Bell.
The program opened with the superbly romantic tone poem “Don Juan,” composed in 1888 by a budding Richard Strauss. The music came gushing forth from Luisi’s baton in a veritable symphonic deluge, leaving the unsuspecting audience awed and astonished. In the space of only a few bars, Strauss’ hefty orchestra reached such staggering dynamic heights that one almost felt compelled to reach around the armrests for a phantom seatbelt.
Luisi’s conducting had an unmistakable Old World quality, with the mystique and bravado associated with a former generation of conductors such as Stokowsky and Toscanini. In an age when European concert etiquette is generally dismissed as dated and cumbersome, it is highly uncommon to meet a conductor whose very persona exudes the mannerisms and formal protocols of the continent’s nobility.
Fabio Luisi is clearly a seasoned, first-rate conductor, who wears the title “maestro” well. A native of Genoa, Luisi is currently in his second year as the music director of the Dresden Semperoper. He is also the chief conductor of both the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Vienna Symphony (not to be mistaken with the Vienna Philharmonic, which has never had a permanent principal conductor).
Next on the program was the Introduction and rondo capriccioso by 19th century French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Opposite Dresden’s dignified and tuxedoed Fabio Luisi was the jacketless violin virtuoso Joshua Bell of Indiana, who, at 41, still sports the same boyish looks and demeanor of his early career.
The rondo’s principal theme—with its distinctive, ornamented upbeat followed by three falling notes in a syncopated rhythm—has become one of the most recognizable tunes in the violin repertoire, familiar even to those with limited exposure to classical music. It has both inspired and challenged students of the violin for 150 years, and its mastery continues to be an important landmark in a musician’s career. Joshua Bell’s performance on his rare Stradivarius was simply exquisite, matched befittingly by San Francisco Symphony’s flawless accompaniment.
The concert continued with Ravel’s “Tzigane” (Gypsy), composed in 1924 for the legendary Hungarian female violinist Jelly d’Arányi. The piece opened with a series of mesmerizing, highly improvisatory passages for solo violin in the tradition of Eastern European gypsy music, which Joshua Bell delivered with stunning clarity.
It is suggested that Ravel simply transcribed this section as d’Arányi played one gypsy melody after another at a late evening party in London. The composer later added a piano accompaniment to the second half of the piece, which he subsequently orchestrated into its present-day form.
“Tzigane” exemplifies the music of early 20th century France we now call Impressionism as championed by Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, both of whom frequently used foreign, exotic musical elements in their works.
Bell’s brilliant performance of “Tzigane” was reciprocated by the audience’s unrelenting applause, prompting several returns to the stage followed by a sweeping standing ovation.
The evening concluded with the 1933 Third Symphony by Slovako-Hungarian composer, Franz Schmidt. This four-movement work was composed during a musically fertile period in Central Europe, when proponents of late Romantic tonality and the emerging serialism were at odds, although each was perhaps secretly fascinated by the other. Schmidt’s Third Symphony contains traces of influences flowing from one musical style and philosophy to another.
Schmidt’s work can be said to encapsulate the richness and variety of thought that seemed to coexist in Europe during a period of respite between the two wars. Fabio Luisi gave the American public a thought-provoking glimpse into this special time in the continent’s history.
Eman Isadiar teaches piano at the Peninsula Conservatory and writes about music in the San Francisco Bay Area.
