Symphony serves up a frenetic program
San Francisco Symphony patrons who showed up at Davies Symphony Hall on Friday night expecting an orchestra concert might have been surprised to find an odd Parisian cabaret show breaking out. And that was just the capper, coming after successive visits to a dystopian night club and a tranquil Indonesian village.
The weekend’s program, dubbed “Music for a Modern Age,” was a manic, madcap multimedia revue that Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas originally presented last year with the New World Symphony in Miami. There were dancers and singers, video projections and elaborate lighting cues, a funk band and a gamelan. It was all very breathless, as well as a little imperious in its demands to the audience: “Are you not entertained?”
Well, yes, one was entertained, up to a point. The closing number, an elaborately
staged version of George Antheil’s 1925 “Jazz Symphony” — conceived by Thomas and directed by him and Patricia Birch — certainly conveyed a giddy sense of Jazz Age Paris. “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind,” Thomas’ own polystylistic setting of a Carl Sandburg meditation on the inevitable decline of great civilizations, whirled through its paces with enough kinetic energy for several works.
But the evening’s most telling rewards came during the calmer interludes, when listeners were able to meet the music on its own terms and at its own pace, rather than having it aggressively sold to them. In a pair of short Charles Ives pieces (”From the Steeples and the Mountains” and “The Unanswered Question”), and especially in an exquisite performance of four movements from Lou Harrison’s “Suite for Violin and American Gamelan,” the air of placidity came as a welcome respite.
Admittedly, I heard the Ives from the lobby, along with other late arrivals stymied by traffic snarls around Civic Center, but even there the music pulsated through the doors of the hall, left open to accommodate Ives’ spatial layout. And Harrison’s music — which featured a gorgeous, billowing solo turn by violinist Nadya Tichman accompanied by six percussionists — demonstrated yet again his prodigious gift for spinning the straw of apparently simple melodic and rhythmic motifs into expansive gold lamé.
Antheil’s alchemy was of a different sort, one that often consisted of extruding yards and yards of musical gimcrackery and then persuading you through sheer gumption and bravado that you’d heard something worthwhile. “A Jazz Symphony” — which cycles through a series of peppy rhythmic bursts and clattery instrumental virtuosity before winding up with a broad, sentimental waltz based on Chopin’s First Ballade — is a paper-thin creation, but it always brings a smile, and the staged version was along the same lines.
For the occasion, the audience found itself in the “Club Nouveau Monde,” where two cabaret dancers — the zesty good-girl flapper Kiva Dawson and the slinky femme fatale Erin Moore — cavorted about the stage and tried to seduce the performers. Dawson worked her wiles on piano soloist Peter Dugan, while Moore drew her orbit around trumpeter Mark Inouye — who also dispatched a gloriously lusty solo, all growls and plunger-driven wah-wah — as well as four members of the violin section.
Thomas’ Sandburg setting, meanwhile, seemed determined to encompass a disparate collection of ideas, but never brought any of them into sharp focus. The pop music, a Xerox-of-a-Xerox conjuring of James Brown and Herb Albert, sounded woefully out of date in 2017, and the writing for orchestra — aside from a superbly inventive opening bass clarinet solo, given eloquence and heft by Jerome Simas — rarely mustered much character.
That left it to soprano Measha Brueggergosman, along with her girl-groupesque sidekicks Mikaela Bennett and Kara Dugan, to bring some zest to the proceedings. But they were often stymied by the muddy sound design (amplification, it seems, is never free of problems in Davies), which made it hard for their contributions to register.
“A Jazz Symphony” is a paper-thin creation, but it always brings a smile, and the staged version was along the same lines.