A young genius’ sojourn in Italy
Uncompromising guest conductor Luisi a strong believer in early work by Strauss
When you and I go on vacation, we send back postcards (or at least we did, back in the pre-Instagram era). Composers send back orchestral music.
Richard Strauss spent the summer of 1886 in Italy as an impressionable 22-year-old, soaking up the sounds, sights and smells of the country, and like Mendelssohn and Berlioz before him, he recorded those observations in musical form. The result was the exuberant symphonic fantasy “Aus Italien” (“From Italy”), which got a rare and impassioned performance on Thursday, April 27, by the San Francisco Symphony under guest conductor Fabio Luisi.
The key elements to any successful performance of this four-movement score, I suspect, are in fact “impassioned” and “rare.” Like much of Strauss’ early music, this is a piece that is bursting with eagerness to show you everything — everything the young tourist heard and saw on the far side of the Alps, and everything he could do with an orchestra to render those experiences.
Precocity, in other words, is both the selling point and the limitation here. The range of the young composer’s learning — the ease with which he incorporates the models of Mendelssohn, Berlioz and increasingly Liszt into his own creation — is impressive, as is the inventiveness with which he deploys his performing forces. Yet compared with the full-fledged tone poems that Strauss would go on to write soon afterward, “Aus Italien” sounds like comparatively pallid stuff. The big Cinerama chords that conjure up the Italian countryside in the first movement are lovingly upholstered but static; the Neapolitan finale, with its bumptious variations on “Funiculì, Funiculà,” is simultaneously zesty and coarse.
So the piece registers today as something of a novelty, a stylistic record of a young genius finding his way toward his full powers. Roberto Abbado’s performances in 2001 marked the only previous Symphony outings.
Fortunately, Luisi declined to compromise or make any apology on behalf of the young Strauss. He led “Aus Italien” with the fervor and commitment of one fully convinced of the music’s greatness — and in the process he almost made a listener share that belief.
Certainly the opening movement sounded more stately and expansive than I’ve ever heard it, shot through with ripe orchestral colors and tracing its melodies with sinuous appeal. The evocation of Roman ruins in the second movement drove to a forceful conclusion, carried along by powerhouse playing from the brass. And the shimmery water imagery in the third movement, a virtuoso effect created by the strings, cast a gorgeous spell.
This was a performance that left you wanting more — while at the same time, paradoxically, resigning you to the fact that this was all there was to the work.
The first half of Thursday’s concert in Davies Symphony Hall was devoted to a strange and intermittently successful rendition of Schumann’s Piano Concerto, with Igor Levit as the soloist. Levit has established a track record as a bold and commanding pianist — his massive recording last year of piano variations by Bach, Beethoven and Rzewski is a landmark of ambition — but those qualities were in oddly spotty evidence on this occasion.
Instead, he and Luisi seemed to have decided to debone at least the first movement of Schumann’s concerto, reducing the music to a series of squishy textures that rarely registered a rhythmic profile. That ultra-lyrical approach did pay off in a rhapsodically lovely account of the slow movement, but the finale again felt like an assortment of pulled punches.