Restraint pays off on Prokofiev piece
Prokofiev thought pretty highly of his Third Symphony, regarding it as a stylistic advance in his creative output. The rest of the world hasn’t always agreed, which is why the piece doesn’t get heard nearly as often as more popular works such as the Fifth Symphony or the Third Piano Concerto.
But here’s the thing: Prokofiev was right. Composers do have a maddening way of often knowing better.
The San Francisco Symphony returned to the Third Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, May 3, in a largely compelling concert led by guest conductor Juraj Valcuha. And with each go-round — Michael Tilson Thomas led the piece just five years ago — Prokofiev’s mastery of orchestral texture, of dramatic flow and of symphonic nuance becomes ever more apparent.
This is striking in large part because the sources of the Third Symphony — what we might call its origin story — would seem to work against it. Prokofiev assembled the piece out of large chunks of his opera “The Fiery Angel,” which is a brilliant, overheated hallucinatory mess about sexual obsession and related topics.
That music is fervid enough in its original context, and the idea of turning it into an actual symphony — not just a suite that serves as a compilation of tunes and other thematic material — should be its own form of madness. How do you get theatrical music this unfettered to stay in its own lane?
Yet Thursday’s performance reaffirmed the Third Symphony’s ability to operate at a level of inspiration that is at once explosive and intricately plotted, like some sort of slowrelease pyrotechnic display. Valcuha and the orchestra brought vibrancy and color to the huge first movement, which can threaten to overbalance the rest of the score if it’s not kept at least somewhat in check.
The remaining three movements not only took their incandescence from that opening — one fuse lighting the next in an unbroken chain — but flourished even more engrossingly in the space left by Valcuha’s comparative restraint at the outset.
There’s a kind of fearless generosity — a combination of rhythmic brusqueness and expressive transparency — that Valcuha brings to many of his performances. It was a combination that informed the performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto just before intermission, one that found the orchestra, at any rate, operating with impressive weight and fluidity (Eugene Izotov gave a wondrously lucid account of the expansive oboe solo that opens the slow movement).
The soloist, debuting violinist Ray Chen, made his way through the concerto with plenty of bravado but not much distinctiveness that I could discern. This was a performance that hit all the required marks — fierce athleticism in the opening movement, broad-beamed lyricism in the central adagio — without quite putting an individual stamp on the material. There was more personality in the short encore, a nimble and heartfelt rendition of Paganini’s Caprice No. 21, than in most of the concerto.
“Unstuck,” a 10-minute orchestral potpourri by the wildly inventive young composer Andrew Norman, got the evening off to a frustrating start. Here again the back story is key — the piece, according to the composer’s telling, is assembled out of fragments that had refused to cohere.
They still refuse to cohere, and the invocation of Kurt Vonnegut’s line (from “Slaughterhouse-Five”) about the protagonist becoming “unstuck in time” feels less like an artistic justification than an excuse. There are brief bursts of Technicolor film scoring, atomized single-note tapestries, a conga line, a softedged funeral march and much more, each of which takes the stage for a few seconds before disappearing again.
Each moment is vividly imagined and scored with Norman’s characteristic virtuosity, but one-thing-after-another is a shaky framework on which to build. The piece’s most exciting passages, including a heart-touching final fade, find the cellos struggling to maintain a steady rhythm while the music slips and slides — sections in which unstuckness becomes, for once, the music’s true subject matter.