Bernstein’s charm in less-heard works
One of the rewards of an extended project like the ongoing celebration of the Leonard Bernstein centennial is that we get a crack at some of the lesser-known repertoire we wouldn’t ordinarily hear. In addition to the heavy hitters — “Candide,” “The Age of Anxiety” and so on — there are entertaining baubles like the Divertimento, which made a winning opener for the San Francisco Symphony’s concert in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Feb. 22.
No one would ever mistake this piece, which Bernstein wrote in 1980 to celebrate the centennial of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for a major artistic creation. Its goals are modest, its scope determinedly limited.
But, lordy, is it fun.
There was plenty of room elsewhere on the program, led by guest conductor Andrey Boreyko, for more serious fare. The Serenade, Bernstein’s intellectually precocious musical treatment of Plato’s “Symposium,” got a rich and probing account with Vadim Gluzman as the violin soloist, and Shostakovich’s darkly stirring Fifth Symphony spread its grandeur across the second half of the evening.
Yet there was something irresistible about the cottoncandy charms of the Divertimento that lingered in the memory long after the evening’s more ambitious strains had faded. Building a lasting masterpiece is surely more important in the scheme of things, but there’s something impressive in hearing what a great composer can dash off as fluff.
The piece comprises eight tiny movements, each a carefully crafted exercise in genre and each one conscientiously labeled. There’s an elegant waltz (in 7/8 time rather than 3/4, which only adds to the suavity), a languorous, decidedly un-Chopinesque mazurka and a tart, silly episode titled “Turkey Trot.”
“Sphinxes” nods to the mysteriously unplayable movement of the same name in “Carnaval,” expanding Schumann’s four long notes to 12. And the concluding march brings the spirit of John Philip Sousa on stage to watch approvingly as various woodwind and brass players leap to their feet and take the spotlight.
The thing about a piece like the Divertimento is that a composer can’t write such enjoyable folderol without also having the creative technique and imagination to work on a bigger and more ambitious scale. To hear this music, in Boreyko’s crisp and splendidly paced rendition, was to be reminded by implication of Bernstein’s broader musical gifts.
The Serenade, in this context, seemed to fall a bit between two stools — not quite carefree enough for pure entertainment value, yet not as weighty as the philosophical underpinnings might suggest. But Gluzman and the orchestra conspired to cast the music in its most favorable light, bringing rhythmic vivacity to the rapid, ingratiating second and third movements and endowing the luminous slow movement (“Agathon”) with a rapturous expressive sheen.
After intermission, Boreyko lent Shostakovich’s Fifth an undeniable sense of weight and intensity, mixed with a rather stolid approach to the piece’s pacing. The big framing movements and particularly the vast slow movement tended to start and end strongly but sag a little toward the midpoint; powerful contributions from the brass helped lift the proceedings off the ground.