Symphony explores unfamiliar creations
The numbing insistence by so many orchestras on playing the same small handful of certified old masterpieces over and over doesn’t just limit our exposure to the music of our own time, although that’s bad enough. It means we don’t even get to hear some of the lesserknown creations of the past.
The San Francisco Symphony’s matinee concert on Thursday, May 31, led with vivid assurance by guest conductor Semyon Bychkov, felt like an object lesson on this important point — a corrective, even. Of the three works in the lineup, two were basically unknowns, appearing on a Symphony program for the first time; the third, Tchaikovsky’s Second
Symphony, is not entirely unfamiliar but does tend to be overshadowed by its more prominent successors.
So being in Davies Symphony Hall felt like a real adventure, a journey across new and newish terrain in the hands of a trusted guide. It’s not a sensation we get to experience often enough.
And that was true regardless of the quality of the music on offer. To hear the “Oresteia” Overture of Sergei Taneyev, a younger colleague and acolyte of Tchaikovsky’s, was to get a glimpse of an intriguing and often exciting musical style, deployed with skill and imagination. Why this piece isn’t a standard repertoire item is difficult to fathom.
Conversely, a single encounter with Bruch’s Concerto for Two Pianos made it clear that once was perfectly sufficient, perhaps even excessive — and that too is useful knowledge! They can’t all be gems, and there’s something to be said for knowing where the duds are.
One way or another, Bychkov’s visit was a gift, as it so often is — an occasion for thoughtful programming and vigorous, humane execution. The orchestra sounded as forceful and sweet-toned as I’ve heard it, and Bychkov molded each piece with a canny sense of both its dramatic shape and its instrumental colors.
Those qualities came through with particular zest in Taneyev’s work from 1889, which began life as the introduction to a lengthy operatic triptych based on Greek mythology before being sheared away to serve as a standalone concert piece. Wise observers who have encountered “Oresteia” at its full threehours-plus length have little to say that would make others eager to repeat the experience, but the orphaned overture is a remarkable invention, at once conventional and daring in its creative strokes.
At a basic dramatic level, Taneyev’s writing is no less effective for moving in traditional directions. The fate of the House of Atreus elicits ominous explosions of timpani and strings, while the trombones offer glowering pronouncements. There’s a limpid violin solo midway through ( Jeremy Constant was the eloquent soloist), and the piece concludes with a lush, spangly rhapsody for strings and harp that an early critic aptly called out as a call-back to Wagner’s “Lohengrin.”
But at the same time, there are wonderful oddities in Taneyev’s harmonic and tonal palette that transcend the obviousness of his dramaturgy. In particular, he uses a gappy melodic scale, a little like the one Stravinsky would later use in “The Firebird” but with a wilder configuration of intervals; as a result, every tune sounds like it has been bent intriguingly out of kilter. The return of orthodox harmony in the final section only sounds the more ingratiating by comparison.
Bruch’s concerto, meanwhile, resisted all efforts by Bychkov or the soloists — the sister pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque — to turn its trumpery drabness to good effect. Written in 1915 for Ottilie and Rose Sutro (the nieces of former San Francisco mayor and public baths impresario Adolph Sutro), it consists of four movements that are by turns pompous, overwritten and thinly imagined.
Often, Bruch finds four solo hands more than he knows what to do with, and simply sets the two pianists hollering back and forth at one another like rival stall-keepers in a marketplace. The one exception is in the finale, when nimble scales and passagework flow between the two instruments with a winning air of dexterity. Bruch is still known almost exclusively for his G-Minor Violin Concerto, and this is by no means the piece to alter that legacy.
The Tchaikovsky, subtitled “Little Russian,” came as a welcome restorative after intermission, in a performance that did justice to the composer’s graceful spirit and ingenious use of folk tunes. Robert Ward’s expansive opening horn solo — forceful yet tender — got things off on the right foot, and the rest of the symphony passed in a joyous lilt.