When does 180 miles equal light-years? When you hear Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony and Shostakovich’s Ninth on the same concert, and realize that the composers’ hometowns (Järvenpää and Leningrad) are that far apart from each other.
The symphonies are profound, and profoundly different. The Sibelius occupies space like a slow seethe of tide on the coast of a continent, whereas the Shostakovich floods a concert hall like a battery of nozzles at a carwash, its striking, satiric suggestions, circus antics, shrill sprays of piccolo, and bitter waltzes and laments all now inseparable from their creator and his plight in the age of Stalinism. Did the San Francisco Symphony, under Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, handle this vast stylistic disparity in its Friday night concert?
Not quite, but it deserves an E for effort. The tempos for the Sibelius Seventh were right, and the Symphony was in fine form. Tilson Thomas exhorted the players, squeezing out sound with manifold gestures. But the symphony is in many ways a minimalist work, stuck, for the most part, in a thick sound world of long pedal points. As Scott Fogelsong writes in the unusually poetic program notes:
[T]he music persistently coalesces around its original molecules. Scales and semitones examined, contemplated, cycled, recycled, flipped over, peered through, stirred up, pressed down, rotated, modified, expanded, contracted, elaborated, simplified, heated, cooled, mixed, separated. … Melody, harmony, form, time, musical space itself — all subsumed.In such an environment, the few flashes emerging from the subterranean cauldron of sound must be seized. The occasional pizzicatos, the stunning moment of silence near the conclusion and, most of all, the soaring trombone melody that structures the work with its three repetitions could have used a bit more emphasis and clarity. But Tilson Thomas deserves congratulations nonetheless for taking up the challenge of Nordic repertoire, a task usually left to guest conductors.