S.F. Opera Orchestra dramatic and vivid
The members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra spend much of their time performing yeomanly labors in the pit of the War Memorial Opera House. But every once in a while they emerge into the spotlight — perhaps blinking a bit, like the freed prisoners in “Fidelio” — to receive their due recognition.
Sunday afternoon’s concert, presented by Cal Performances in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, found the orchestra and Music Director Nicola Luisotti mostly in splendid form. The qualities that distinguish the orchestra’s strongest performances — a robust and finely colored ensemble sound, a powerful sense of dramatic momentum — apply just as well to the symphonic as the operatic repertoire.
Sunday’s program even offered a welcome corrective to the repertoire with a performance of Luigi Cherubini’s Symphony in D. The music of Cherubini, a slightly older contemporary of Beethoven’s, is too rarely heard in any case, and this symphony, with its forthright orchestral writing and bold melodic profile, is a particularly unfortunate oversight.
Luisotti and the orchestra helped by making a particularly persuasive case for the score. The expansive outer movements luxuriated in their formal breadth without ever sounding long-winded, and Luisotti gave an expressive sheen to the slow movement that helped bring it vividly to life.
Before intermission, the gifted Israeli cellist Amit Peled joined the orchestra for an impressive account of Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C. It’s all too easy to make this music sound delicate or ornate, but Peled and Luisotti clearly agreed that it needed a hot-blooded, even rather aggressive approach.
They made it work, delivering the opening movement with more fervor and flair than it sometimes gets and tearing dramatically into the finale. Peled brought emotional urgency to the slow movement, as well as a wonderful level of technical prowess throughout.
The only weak point in the concert came at the beginning, with a rendition of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony that spurned transparency and fleetness in favor of an oddly ponderous rhythmic profile.