Berlioz subs nicely for Berlioz with Dutoit
It was hard to suppress a wince of dismay when the word came down in October that this week’s San Francisco Symphony program, led by guest conductor Charles Dutoit, would not feature Berlioz’s “Requiem” as originally planned. Opportunities to encounter this majestic, unwieldy beast in the wild are rare, and Dutoit — whose mastery of this composer’s music is well established — seemed like just the person to take it on.
But OK, we’re all adults here. We shoulder disappointment and move on. The “Requiem” has been rescheduled for 2017, and in the meantime, Dutoit spent Thursday night, March 17, leading the Symphony through a vigorous and largely satisfying replacement program.
Berlioz still held pride of place, in performances that served as a reminder of why this composer continues to confound and amaze listeners. His “Waverley” Overture, a youthful channeling of Romantic vitality inspired by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, began the evening in a rush of exuberant color, and after intermission, principal violist Jonathan Vinocour took center stage for a dramatically charged account of “Harold in Italy.”
Both pieces, each in its own way, served as a testament to Berlioz’s strange, rule- breaking genius. The overture — which has been performed by the Symphony only once before, in 1971 under former Music Director Seiji Ozawa — is a strange and compelling
undertaking that gets things slightly wrong more intriguingly than most composers get things right.
There’s an expansive slow introduction that leads to a brisk, somewhat Italianate main section. Yet where most composers might allow the introduction to establish the musical logic of the rest of the piece, Berlioz contrasts the two sections so sharply that they almost seem to invalidate each other.
Dutoit and the orchestra brought out the contrast beautifully, in a way that made it sound marked but not disorienting. The tender lyricism of the opening had just the right uneasy distance from the robust oratory of the latter half, which was borne along swiftly on gleaming currents of brass.
As for “Harold,” it is famously one of Berlioz’s exercises in elusive genre- bending, something between a concerto, a programmatic symphony and a musical fresco. The peripatetic protagonist — his signature theme delivered by Vinocour with radiant, soulful eloquence — makes his way through the landscape amid various picturesque episodes depicted by the orchestra.
There are downcast lovers, religious pilgrims on the march and brigands in a frenzied orgy of pillage and debauchery, all conveyed by the orchestra in almost Technicolor profusion ( Russ deLuna’s plangent English horn solo in the third movement was particularly striking). And through it all, Vinocour and his viola wandered with a winning air of slightly melancholy aloofness, observing everything with a poet’s eye and ear.
In between the two Berlioz offerings, Dutoit led the orchestra in a hearty account of Haydn’s Symphony No. 104. The piece didn’t seem to have anything very specific to do with its surroundings, but it was rendered with such bravura and clarity that it would be churlish to complain.
The viola wandered with a winning air of melancholy aloofness.