Ted Cruz wasn’t going to win the state anyway, in what turned out to be a doomed quest for the Republican presidential nomination, but as if to guarantee it he made a point of disparaging “New York values.” The phrase came to mind Friday, May 6 at Davies Symphony Hall, where Music Director Alan Gilbert brought his New York Philharmonic to play a pair of weekend concerts.
The programming was as plain vanilla as a Mister Softee cone — a Beethoven Seventh Symphony, a Brahms Second, the Schumann Cello Concerto, Finlandia. Then, right out of the gate on Friday with Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Gilbert and his band took a brawny, almost combative stance with the music, as if to prove that new music isn’t the only way to be new. Bows clattered and the horns brayed. The timpani made its presence felt like a boom box in Central Park. The woodwinds passed up sweetness, by and large, in favor of something more insistent and blunt.
An overall density of sound, with thudding attacks and cleanly abrupt cutoffs, prevailed. The music felt by turns exciting, imbalanced, propulsive, alarming, scintillating, and coarse. Gilbert’s podium demeanor underscored the effect, as he stabbed out cues, slashed the air, weaving and feinting like a prizefighter. The Egmont was a sparring match before the Symphony No. 7 main event.
Friday’s concert changed course with a sensitively molded but still firm-jawed Sibelius Symphony No 7 after intermission. An express-train trip to Finlandia followed.
The audience seemed to love the high-protein, no-holds-barred approach, rewarding the conductor and orchestra with standing ovations and Yankee Stadium–style cheers that induced multiple curtain calls. Gilbert, who is leaving his New York Phil post in the summer of 2017, returned the affection with grateful, deep bows and post-Finlandia verbal praise from the podium for the audience and San Francisco. He served up Sibelius’ Valse triste as a “sad and somber” encore after all the pyrotechnics.
It was, all in all, a curious visitation from this esteemed and worthy orchestra. Gilbert’s tenure has been marked by a programming adventurousness that his predecessor, Lorin Maazel, notably lacked. So it was strange to come across the country and bring nothing more recent than Sibelius. Nothing from current composer-in-residence Esa-Pekka Salonen or recent honoree Magnus Lindberg? No composer from the East Coast (or anywhere, for that matter) for San Francisco audiences to encounter for the first time?
But a program finally ought to be judged for what was played rather than what wasn’t. By that measure, it was one of those nights that was arresting, if not always for the most persuasive of reasons.
The terms were established right away, with the full-throated, deeply anchored string sound the New York players mustered in the Egmont and sustained through the evening. With the cellos, basses and violas in decisive mode, it felt as if the music’s bass line had been cranked up a notch or two. It gave Beethoven’s emphatic string chords an unnerving urgency. The horns let out impatient barks. The brasses almost buried the piccolo’s exultant yelps at the overture’s end.
Decoding what a conductor has to say about a standard repertory work like the Beethoven Seventh is a difficult and subjective matter. Gilbert’s reading seemed to favor rawness over deeply worked out drama, immediacy over contemplation.
There was something troubling (in an intriguing way) about the horns’ almost moody refusal to sing out at the end of the first and fourth movements. The nasal tone of the cellos in the second movement rejected loveliness in favor of something pared down to a bare essence. But there were other emphases and details that seemed arbitrary and willful, like the woodwinds choking off phrases in the third movement or the trumpets turning a supporting figure into something outsized in the fourth.
Gilbert submitted the single-movement Sibelius Seventh to the same kind of attentive pressure, even as the sonic texture grew lighter and more yielding. The dissonant waves pulsing in and out of the early bars registered with a tidal inevitability. The violins exuded a pleasant, birch-toned woodiness. Principal trombonist Joseph Alessi heaved out his solos with a deep, burly tone and splendid long line.
The whole piece, right through the alternately tender and reeling strong passages and more soulful trombone work, had a through-line that the Beethoven symphony lacked. Gilbert found both tautness and expansiveness in the composer’s shortest symphony.
There was something cozily familiar about the way the concert ended, even with a Finlandia full of hurtling tempos and a super-heavy string tread. Hearing that followed by a nostalgia-tinted Valse triste was like visiting an old neighborhood where the buildings and people still look the same, as long as you squint a little and don’t notice all that’s changed in them and you over the years.