In Davies, Gaffigan shows winning way with Mozart
Everyone loves Mozart’s music, but not everyone has the knack for performing it. One of the deepest rewards in guest conductor James Gaffigan’s concert with the San Francisco Symphony on Thursday, Jan. 19, was his persuasive mastery of this repertoire.
It’s not as easy as it looks, and frankly, it doesn’t look all that easy.
With its translucent textures and elegantly balanced phrases, Mozart’s writing is full of traps for the unwary musician — not just conductors, but singers and instrumentalists as well. Even the most ardent devotees can make the music sound merely bland and lovable, or go in the other direction and try to turn the composer into a galvanic fist-shaker.
Thursday’s performance of the composer’s “Linz” Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall found Gaffigan threading that needle with consummate dexterity. The orchestra sounded buoyant but solid, giving Mozart’s music a wonderful sense of rhythmic vitality as well as plenty of emotional urgency.
Those qualities registered in various ways in the two outer movements, which Gaffigan shaped as expansive and often probing statements, and in the crisp, fluid slow movement. Even the minuet, which can easily come off as a stretch of rip-roaring bluster, sounded notably consequential.
Part of the performance’s success could be chalked up to the close communication between Gaffigan and the orchestra members, many of whom must still know him well from his time as the Symphony’s associate conductor nearly a decade ago. There was a quickness of response to the performance, as well as a welcome rhythmic tautness, that can be harder to establish with unfamiliar conductors.
And that familiarity paid off not just in the Mozart but also in the bigger and splashier works that framed the program.
“A Night on Bald Mountain,” Mussorgsky’s raw, eerie orchestral evocation of witches, demons and other diablerie, got the evening off to a chilling start. Using the composer’s original version in place of the toned-down, gentrified version by Rimsky-Korsakov, Gaffigan laid plenty of emphasis on the music’s swooping ferocity and rhythmic unruliness.
Ferocity without unruliness was in evidence later on, with a brisk and sinuous account of the Dance of the Seven Veils from Richard Strauss’ “Salome.” To hear the orchestra lavish its gifts on the composer’s glittery instrumental colors and dramatic intensity was to wish — not for the first time — that these musicians could somehow be heard more often in the operatic repertoire.
The evening’s only source of dismay was the return of violinist Simone Lamsma, who transformed Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 into a welter of ragged passagework, poor intonation and interpretive uncertainty. All of those shortcomings were on ample display during Lamsma’s unfortunate debut here three years ago; in a world awash with capable violinists, it’s hard to imagine the Symphony’s motivation in bringing her back for another go-round.