Schiff adds inventive hybrid to repertoire
No one could ever accuse the pianist and conductor András Schiff of doing things by halves. The revelatory series of solo recitals he’s given in recent years have been meaty explorations of the music of Bach, Schubert, Beethoven and more, often clocking in at close to three hours with extensive encores.
Schiff doesn’t stint in other contexts either. For his guest program with the San Francisco Symphony this week, heard in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday afternoon, Feb. 14, he packed the first half of the concert with three hefty pieces of Bach, which under ordinary circumstances might have been the main event.
But Schiff had something even more pressing on his mind — adding Mendelssohn’s tremendous choralorchestral masterpiece “Lobgesang” (”Song of Praise”) to the Symphony’s repertoire. By the time the audience reeled into the street more than 2½ hours later, we had plenty to think about and process.
For this listener, the takeaway from Thursday’s impressive performance was all
about the Mendelssohn, which simply does not have the stature and presence in our musical life that it deserves. It’s an inventive, expressively powerful work that lends itself to both a period approach (Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra gave a splendid performance in 2016) and to the Symphony’s more familiar modern sonorities.
Why is this one not on every orchestra’s books?
One obvious reason — although this falls apart on the most cursory examination — is that the formal plan is highly unorthodox. “Lobgesang,” which is sometimes referred to as Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2, is a genre hybrid, which the composer dubbed with plainspoken accuracy a “symphony-cantata.”
First comes the symphony part — three quarters of the traditional four-movement ground plan — and then about 40 minutes’ worth of dramatic cantata. The latter, with its biblical texts, chorales and solo vocal interjections, is very much in the vein of Mendelssohn’s neoHandelian oratorios such as “Elijah” and “St. Paul.”
Is that a strange juxtaposition? Yes, slightly — for about 15 seconds, until you realize that it’s simply a conscious tweak of the formal outline of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Like Beethoven, though in a sleeker and more urbane manner, Mendelssohn was always pushing against genre expectations; his innovation of joining symphonic movements together without a break, heard in the “Lobgesang” as well as elsewhere, turns out to have a much greater impact on a listener’s experience than you might expect. “Lobgesang” takes the models of Beethoven, Bach and Handel (by way of Haydn) and fuses them into something wholly original.
Both the originality and the emotional grandeur of the work came through in Thursday’s formidable rendition. There’s no mistaking the fact that Schiff is a pianist who also conducts as a side gig — a full-time conductor would have exerted a little more control over some of the more challenging ensemble passages — but this was still a probing and deeply thoughtful reading, sparked by the Symphony’s mighty trombonists who begin the work and remain its heroes throughout.
Schiff brought a combination of elegance and tenderness to the second movement of the symphony, which serves as a scherzo, and broadened things eloquently for the slow movement. But things became even more compelling once the cantata got under way.
The singing of Ragnar Bohlin’s Symphony Chorus was by turns thunderous and intimate. Soprano Jennifer Mitchell and mezzo-soprano Margaret Lisi joined forces for a sumptuous account of the duet “Ich harrete des Herrn,” and tenor Michael Jankosky showed his versatility with clarion recitatives and an arresting depiction of the cantata’s dramatic climax, the passage of night into day.
The all-Bach first half featured Schiff as soloist and (in theory) conductor for the Keyboard Concertos in D (BWV 1054) and A (BWV 1055). Both served as a reminder of what a formidable Bach pianist he is — crisp, nimble and enormously attentive to detail — but also of how little actual conducting gets done in this setup. There was nothing the matter with the performance of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, except that it took time away from the Mendelssohn, which should have been the clear and undisputed star of the proceedings.