What’s new with the San Francisco Symphony? This weekend, a 200-year-old overture.
Hector Berlioz’s music is most often heard at Davies Symphony Hall in repeat performances of his Symphonie Fantastique, a piece that took Beethoven’s symphonic model and raised it to epic proportions. It’s still altogether easier to stage than some of Berlioz’s other compositions, including an opera that runs to five hours and a requiem that calls for hundreds of singers.
Fortunately for Berlioz, the Symphony’s program on Friday, Jan. 24, had room enough for both that “new” piece — the composer’s King Lear Overture from 1831, which the orchestra was performing for the first time — and another of his works, the Overture to Les Francs-juges, last played by the Symphony in 1988. Guest conductor Mark Elder led the concert, and if the performance was somewhat subdued, the programming itself was invigorating.
Phrases flow freely in the music for Les Francs-juges (translated as The Free Judges or The Judges of the Secret Court), an opera that Berlioz worked on for some time but never finished. The melodies sound like impassioned speech. Berlioz was 22 when he wrote the overture, in 1826, but some of its material dates back to his teenage years, before he had ever seen a full orchestral score, let alone written anything for large ensemble. He didn’t play the piano — he didn’t play much of anything — yet here his orchestration is virtuosic, using instruments that were then recent inventions, like the piccolo and the contrabassoon, to extend the music’s reach.
Eruptions from the strings shatter the woodwinds’ sweet chords. At one point, the two violin sections face off in ruthless runs. The opera, a political drama, may have never materialized, but it’s not hard to imagine the hero’s story.
Five years later, right before he would pen the King Lear Overture, the drama was Berlioz’s personal life. Jilted, jealous, and living in Rome, he plotted to murder his former fiancee and her new beau, setting out for Paris and reaching Nice before coming to his senses. In a flash came King Lear. A poignant oboe melody, gorgeously played on Friday by associate principal James Button, represents the abandoned king’s sole devoted daughter and offers a moment of respite. Other passages sound frenetic and bizarre.
And yet Berlioz has always had his advocates. In England, one important friend during the composer’s lifetime was the founder of the Hallé Orchestra — the same orchestra that, in 2000, Elder would come to direct.
Throughout his decades-long career, the conductor has championed Berlioz. And hearing Elder speak from the Davies stage, it was clear that he has enormous enthusiasm for this composer whose full output is still emerging.
On Friday, Berlioz’s music sounded perhaps less wild than wan — in those explosive passages of Les Francs-juges, for example, and in the tremolo storm scene during King Lear. As the evening went on, Elder seemed to shift his approach; things got better when the orchestra played closer to his beat. But the issues that impacted the start of the program — shaky ensemble and timid entrances that resulted in interpretations largely without shape — came back after intermission. A performance of Richard Strauss’s extravagant tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra here received a rather workmanlike reading.
Tucked between the two Berlioz pieces was a mesmerizing performance of Claude Debussy’s hazy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun that spotlighted principal flutist Yubeen Kim. And for a grand finale, there was Bay Area composer John Adams’s blazing four-minute fanfare, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, totally out of place and sounding fantastic. Berlioz would have approved.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
