Adventures in Programming

If an often-played masterpiece is a warhorse, what is its opposite? I had just written about the benefits of unusual programming in the pastures of Arizona when, lo and behold, not one but three peacehorses galloped into the San Francisco Symphony’s Davies Hall, two of them bridled by überpianist Emanuel Ax, and a third paraded magnificently by guest conductor Peter Oundjian.

The symphony didn’t entirely eschew the tried and true. No, a security blanket, Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute, began the concert. But next came Karol Szymanowski’s Symphonie Concertante, aka Symphony No. 4 for piano and orchestra. Szymanowski is the greatest Polish composer after Chopin, but in the entire U.S. and Canada, according to the League of American Orchestras, he’s only programmed about three times a year. He started off like a Richard Strauss clone, then evolved two distinctive styles. The first was sensuous, almost orgiastic. Toward the end of his fairly short career (he died of tuberculosis in 1937, aged 54), his music became more astringent, Bartókian, and folksy, but the wildness never left. The 1932 Concertante is a barnburner, and benefits from an over-the-top approach, provided the musicians are in peak form. The last time the Concertante was performed by the Symphony was nine months before Pearl Harbor. At long last, this terrifically exciting number showed up like a P-51 out of the Bermuda Triangle, and the audience cheered to hear the way Ax banged out its conclusion like he was machine-gunning enemy fighter pilots. “There are many, many notes,” Ax explained at the Friday “6.5” performance, which jettisoned the Mozart in order to provide five minutes of a loosely prepared public conversation between the soloist and conductor. Ax went on to theorize that Szymanowski, who intended that his compatriot and champion Artur Rubinstein perform the work, was forced by financial difficulties to consider playing it himself. A plethora of notes would make errors less noticeable.

“A” for Accuracy

All the number of notes did at Davies was allow Ax to score more bull’s-eyes with his impressive technique. The hyperactive orchestration rarely left Ax’s piano exposed, where you might hear a deviation from standard interpretive practice — if you can even refer to a “standard” in music this rare. On the other hand, the orchestra had plenty of exposed moments and, for the most part, Oundjian did a splendid job of moving the music along and clarifying the many solo and soloistic passages (Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik, by the way, was super in the ones that he had). I would have appreciated a little more dynamic variation here and there, and there is a climbing passage for horns about two and a half minutes into the first movement that could have used a little more emphasis. Thursday, and even more so Friday, the performance crackled, and the first movement elicited whoops despite between-movement protocol. Oundjian’s direction was effective, if slightly too cool, especially compared to the way Stéphane Denève conducted the Russian National Orchestra in this same work at the Napa Valley Festival Del Sole in July 2006. After the Szymanowski came Richard Strauss’ Burleske. Here was a second piece for piano and orchestra on the same program, and a second way to provide a peacehorse: Perform a rare piece by a famous composer. The Burleske is a fine early work, but is overshadowed by Strauss’ tone poems of the same period, Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration. The last time it graced Davies was 15 years ago. Ax showed no wear from his earlier workout, and dazzled the audience with his ferocious fingers. Oundjian kept up his slightly cool demeanor. I would have appreciated spikier high points in the development section (the piece is called a burlesque after all), but again the tempos were perfect, the playing exemplary, and the audience thrilled. Principal timpanist David Herbert did his usual flawless work playing the theme that begins the work and generates most of the other tunes, one of which may well have inspired Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” from West Side Story. By the way, conductors could stay closer to the spirit of the Friday 6.5 series by having the orchestra play a couple of key illustrative passages in the preconcert conversations. This would have helped the audience warm even more to the unknown Szymanowski. And it would have been great to show how the timpani tune at the outset of Burleske is found in the “second” and “third” themes. After intermission came the third adventure, Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini. This is the evil twin of the composer’s great Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, describing the fate of an adulteress in the second ring of hell in Dante’s Inferno. Like the famous overture, this one has a love theme to die for and has got enough power to defer offshore drilling for many years. Yet it’s played less than one percent of the time among Tchaikovsky’s works. Go figure. If it has a flaw, it’s only a bit more than average of one that pervades all of Tchaikovsky’s music: a penchant for repeating phrases in annoyingly predictable pairs. But at least Oundjian pulled out all the stops this time, greatly pleasing the audience. The orchestra responded in kind and everyone went home, both nights, alive with the joys to be had from adventurous programming.