Thomas’ Americana grab bag
Patriotism, American or otherwise, comes in at least two distinct flavors. There’s genuine appreciation for the virtues of one’s home country (even if that appreciation comes with its own emotional blind spots), and then there’s tawdry jingoism.
The oddly star-spangled burst of Americana that Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony offered over the weekend in Davies Symphony Hall — the Fourth of July coming early or late, depending on how you reckon — included examples of each.
On one hand was Ives’ Symphony No. 3, the composer’s soulful and slightly rueful evocation of the camp meetings of his childhood, a catalog of hymn tunes overlaid with a gauzy veil of memory. And on the other was an appalling novelty item by Dvorák, a justly forgotten cantata entitled “The American Flag.”
Maybe it was intended as a Veterans Day observance, and some of it, at least, was enough to instill a sense of national pride. And as for the rest — well, it served as a timely caution against mere nationalist kitsch.
The Ives symphony is being recorded for the next release on the in-house SFS Media label, and on Saturday the microphones captured a performance marked by tenderness and grace. Subtitled “The Camp Meeting,” the Third Symphony — for which Ives won a Pulitzer Prize after
a decades-late 1946 world premiere arranged and conducted by Lou Harrison — is in some ways an uncharacteristic work for the composer.
The piece is built on a foundation of central hymn tunes, which members of the Symphony Chorus sang first as a primer for 21st century listeners who have long since lost the key to this spiritual tradition. It avoids the harmonic acerbities and jarring juxtapositions of Ives’ other work, in favor of a largely plainspoken nostalgia whose drama is psychological — a Proustian reverie in sound.
What that means, in turn, is that performers have to work extra hard to avoid letting the piece lapse into sugary sentimentality. Thomas and the orchestra achieved that with a firmly established rhythmic and textural infrastructure — no matter how introspective or philosophical the music became, it was never in danger of becoming unmoored.
The evening’s danger came from Dvorák’s cantata, which he composed in 1893 during one of his extended sojourns in America but was lucky enough never to hear performed. (This was the first, and surely the last, time it has appeared on a Symphony program.)
Fitted to a foursquare piece of doggerel by a certain Joseph Rodman Drake, the piece combines barely functional text-setting with a number of cheesy expostulations to the Stars and Stripes. Ragnar Bohlin’s Symphony Chorus, which had begun the evening with a luminous account of Ives’ setting of Psalm 90, rolled up their sleeves and got to work with all the grim professionalism of a bused-in crowd at a campaign rally.
The timpani and trumpets rattled and blared as the text instructed. Bassbaritone Philip Skinner thundered with such pompous grandiloquence I thought he was being sarcastic. Tenor Amitai Pati sang sweetly, with the dissociative stare of someone just waiting for the whole thing to be over.
Happily, the program concluded in splendor, with George Gershwin’s jaunty musical travelogue “An American in Paris.” From the joyful, sleekly shaped string writing to the ingratiating solos from trumpeter Mark Inouye and principal tuba Jeffrey Anderson, it was a performance designed to lift all spirits.
This was the first, and surely the last, time it has appeared on a Symphony program.