Symphony and Denk make it look easy
There’s practically nothing in the standard classical repertoire that’s actually simple to pull off — even the most straightforward music requires boatloads of precision and expressive transparency — but you can certainly run across artists who make it seem easy. In Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, for example, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, together with guest pianist Jeremy Denk, offered an object lesson in effortless virtuosity.
Perhaps only the first piece on the program, Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2, would register on a listener as overtly difficult, with its cascades of rapid-fire passagework and fiercely percussive attacks. But Berlioz’s phantasmagorical “Symphonie fantastique,” which occupied the second half of the program in a sleekly assured rendition, boasts its own set of challenges as well.
In the event, both works came through with striking ease, serving as yet another reminder of how well things can go in Davies when everyone is on their game.
Denk’s appearance was only the latest in a string of forth-
right but interpretively cunning performances he’s given in recent years. In this case, he transformed Bartók’s whirling, ferocious bundle of energy into a smoothly purring machine.
That’s not the only possible way to treat this concerto — when Yuja Wang tackled the piece with the Symphony in 2011, for example, she made it a vehicle for her brand of whizbang extroversion. Denk, by contrast, made the solo part seem like something he could do while also checking his email.
If that makes the performance sound half-baked or inattentive, the effect was anything but. On the contrary, the soloist’s elaborate sangfroid — his attitude of “Chill out, I got this” — made the music sound that much more exciting.
It meant that the volleys of glissandos and the silky spinning textures of the first movement landed with a winning combination of propulsion and cool. It meant that the weightiest and most clangorous sections of both outer movements earned their sense of impact.
And best of all, it made the structural contrasts of the three-part central movement — two matching expanses of eerie, slow-moving music with muted strings framing an ultrafast explosion of angular writing — even more crisply drawn than they would otherwise have been.
As a crowning contrast, Denk returned to the stage with an encore, the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C, K. 545. This sonata, written for beginners, exemplifies the virtues of simplicity and grace; Denk’s performance, resounding in the big space of Davies, created a brief moment of almost sacred hush.
There was no hush after intermission, as Thomas led his forces in a vividly dramatic account of Berlioz’s musical tale of love and madness. It’s a familiar part of the orchestra’s repertoire by now, but the high points never fail to resonate — the formal fluidity of the opening movement, the suave sparkle of the ballroom scene, or the expansive splendors of the long-breathed slow movement framed by eloquent solo turns from English hornist Russ deLuna. The one-two punch of the last two movements, delivered without a pause, made a tumultuous whirlwind conclusion.