Hrusa leads Symphony through river of sound
The swirling waters that cascaded through Davies Symphony Hall over the weekend sounded vivid enough to swim in, or at least to indulge in a picturesque al fresco meal on the riverbank. Such was the power of the San Francisco Symphony, bringing Smetana’s “Vltava” to life under debuting guest conductor Jakub Hrusa.
“Vltava,” or “The Moldau” in the Teutonic translation by which it’s become better known over the years, is the composer’s attempt to evoke the flow of the title river across the Bohemian countryside. On the back of a broad-beamed, stirringly sentimental main theme, the river churns its way past cities and villages, mountains and farmlands, on its way to the sea.
This is pictorialism at its most flagrantly specific, and on Sunday afternoon — the last of three concerts devoted to this program — Hrusa and the orchestra combined to give it a reading of downright Technicolor immediacy. The strings darted and ed-
died, the brass unleashed a series of expansive harmonies, and the entire performance erected a mighty structure out of discrete currents of sound.
“Vltava” is just one of the six patriotic tone poems that make up Smetana’s magnum opus “Ma Vlast” (“My Homeland”), and Hrusa lavished the work with such tenderness and commitment that one longed to hear him tackle the entire cycle (it’s been two decades since the Symphony last performed “Ma Vlast” complete, under Libor Pesek). Perhaps this was just a taste of things to come.
Instead, Hrusa — who holds a variety of conducting posts in Prague, Tokyo and Bamberg, Germany — devoted most of his program to other music by his fellow Czechs.
Dvorák’s “Carnival” Overture, a bustling, tuneful ball of energy if not a particularly obvious expression of national themes, opened the program in a vigorous, rhythmically taut performance. Hrusa’s muscular leadership sometimes put more emphasis on vigor than tonal finesse, but there were passages of elegance and wit amid the fireworks, as well as a touching account of the still-breathed central romance.
Completing the Czech trifecta was “Taras Bulba,” Janácek’s boisterous orchestral triptych based on Gogol’s blood-and-thunder novel about a heroic Cossack. Hrusa led a fervent, almost breathless account of the music, leaning heavily on the composer’s more extroverted strains as he drove toward an explosive conclusion.
The one non-Czech work on offer was Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G, K. 453, which got a dark, rather poker-faced performance from soloist Piotr Anderszewski. This seems to be a characteristic M.O. for the pianist, who adopted a similarly scrubbed approach to Mozart in his last Symphony appearance in 2009.
On this occasion, that meant favoring blunt plainspokenness rather than overt charm in the first movement, and a slow movement that kept changing moods with ferocious suddenness. There’s an undeniable integrity to Anderszewski’s method, if not much gentility or grace.