Musical travelogues charm, for a while
Sooner or later, it seems, every composer feels the urge to try his or her hand as a landscape painter. Whether it’s a matter of postcards from abroad or a little nostalgic and nationalistic fervor for the homeland — oh, the riverbanks and cornfields where I frolicked as a child! — pen and music paper suddenly morph into canvas and brush.
There were plenty of musical landscapes on display in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, May 10, as guest conductor Stéphane Denève led the San Francisco Symphony on a vivid little tour of Southern Europe and Northern Africa. The program was a deft stroke of thematic consistency in the planning, with three of the four works falling into line, and the execution was little short of invigorating.
Yet the up-and-down results had little to do with either the suavity of Denève’s conducting or the masterful playing of the Symphony musicians, and everything to do with the uneven quality of the works themselves. Postcards, after all, can be compact and beautiful works of art or gaudy displays of Technicolor nonsense, depending on the sensibilities involved.
Thursday’s program as it turned out, was entirely frontloaded, with the rewards concentrated before intermission. Right out of the gate we had “Escales,” Jacques Ibert’s ingratiating and vivid 1922 triptych of impressionistic sketches from his honeymoon cruise.
Astonishingly, this piece has been performed by the Symphony exactly once before, in 1948 under Pierre Monteux. That’s a shameful omission for a work so full of color and light, so unassuming in its ambitions and yet so forceful in its effect.
The ports of call to which the title refers are in Sicily, Tunisia and Spain, respectively, and Ibert evokes each of them in music that keeps flirting with caricature only to redeem itself through the power of the composer’s invention.
Yes, the sea voyage to Sicily is a matter of undulating waves and glistening whitecaps as always — but what other composer can render the pull of that imagery with such dexterous use of orchestral color. The trip to Tunisia brings out familiar tropes — the lurching rhythms of camel travel and a sinuous woodwind solo in Arabic modes — but infuses them with new vitality and interest before swiftly bowing out. Even the Spanish dances of the finale sound reimagined.
It helped, too, that Denève — the resourceful French conductor who is about to take the reins of the St. Louis Symphony — collaborated with the orchestra on a reading full of lyricism and tonal brilliance. The scenes conjured up by Ibert seemed to fill the hall; Eugene Izotov delivered the score’s various oboe solos with full-throated eloquence.
And although Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 seemed perfectly content to stay put in the concert hall — it was the one non-travelogue on offer during the program — the playing of soloist Gautier Capuçon provided its own kind of transport.
Capuçon has always been a performer of considerable talents, including a robust, slightly swaggering string tone and a gift for bringing expressive transparency to a wide range or repertoire. But even by his standards, this was a formidable performance, marked by athleticism, tender lyricism and wit in equal proportions. The encore, “The Swan” from Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals,” was unnerving in its still-voiced beauty.
Less fortunate things transpired during the second half. It began with “E chiaro nella valle il fiume appare,” a treacly piece of tone-painting from 2015 by the French composer Guillaume Connesson that lures the audience in with a strong-limbed opening melody, only to devolve into gushy tonal harmonies and a conclusion out of a Hallmark commercial.
Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” which concluded the evening in the usual profusion of garish orchestral color and protoFascist paeans to the military might of the Roman Empire, at least wears its bad taste with conviction. Denève and the orchestra delved right into the morass, and the final blare of the brass from the balcony made a depressingly stirring appeal to nationalist sentiment.