‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Berlioz’s own way
San Francisco Symphony: 8 p.m. Friday, June 30-Saturday, July 1. $45-$165. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. (415) 864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org
Hector Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which brought the San Francisco Symphony’s season to a richly dramatic conclusion in Davies Symphony Hall on Wednesday, June 28, doesn’t fit easily into any of the obvious musical categories — which puts it squarely in line with just about everything the composer ever wrote.
It’s a symphony, sort of. It’s got a narrative, for sure. There are vocal soloists and a chorus, but they’re used sparingly and in unorthodox ways.
As always, Berlioz followed his muse into whatever grand boulevards or twisty byways were required by the project at hand — traditional genres, he believed, were for other people — and on Wednesday night, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the orchestra championed that journey every step of the way.
In a performance recorded for a subsequent release on the orchestra’s in-house SFS Media Label, Thomas and his performing forces — not just the Symphony players themselves, but the members of Ragnar Bohlin’s Symphony Chorus and a trio of high-end vocal soloists — helped bring Berlioz’s quirky, innovative vision to life.
There’s no other way to do it, really. Taking his inspiration from a variety of artistic sources — Shakespeare for the dramatic content, obviously, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for its fluid melding of instrumental and vocal strains within a symphonic framework — Berlioz created one of the great one-offs of the 19th century repertoire.
Among the piece’s anomalies — and this struck a listener with particular force on this occasion — is its ambivalence about using words to set out a dramatic story line. Two of the three vocal soloists help the chorus set the stage with narration and a lyrical effusion from the mezzosoprano, then make themselves scarce; the baritone, who shows up at the end to embody Friar Laurence, is the only singer to take an actual character role.
So the familiar events of the drama — the party at which the two lovers meet, their romantic idyll, and the exchange of poisons in the tomb — are mostly laid out by the orchestra, in terms that are simultaneously pictorial and symphonic. The multi-movement format keeps the floor plan of a traditional symphony in the background, even as the course of the narrative keeps nudging it different directions.
Thomas, of course, is a past master of the art of spontaneity that this kind of fluidity requires. In his most persuasive performances, large-scale structure always seems to be emerging from the swarm of details, rather than being imposed from without.
And that was precisely what came through in this 95-minute performance, as each large block of musical material gave way to the next in a way that felt both logical and freely chosen. The orchestral introduction, with its fugal depiction of the strife between Montagues and Capulets, bustled along vividly without losing any of the muchneeded rhythmic tautness.
Romeo’s moody soliloquy (evocatively captured by Eugene Izotov’s plaintive oboe solo) yielded to the vivid bursts of the party scene, and the expansive love music — surely some of Berlioz’s most lush and exquisite orchestral writing — had a poignancy that only become keener with each extension of the material.
The soloists were so fine as to seem like luxury casting, from the radiant verses of mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and tenor Nicholas Phan’s pointed description of Queen Mab to the thunderous final declamations of bassbaritone Luca Pisaroni as Laurence. And throughout it all, the Symphony Chorus, whether in small subgroups or the mighty, full complement of voices, sang with all their customary vibrancy and ardor.