Wolfe’s ‘Fountain’ unleashes a glorious roar
Julia Wolfe’s new orchestral piece “Fountain of Youth” comes on with an exciting and original sonority. She has all the string players creating a deep, sustained scratch sound with their bows, while a battery of percussion keeps up a steady rhythmic pulse, and then brings in all the woodwinds and brass.
Within just a few seconds of its opening, “Fountain of Youth” — which got a thrilling West Coast premiere on Thursday, Jan. 16, from Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, who were among the cocommissioners — washes over the audience with a sort of sonic tsunami. It’s not oppressively loud, but it’s got a dense, almost physical presence that grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.
Musical onslaughts have long been a signature move for Wolfe, who at 61 stands among the most interesting and boldly inventive composers of her generation. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, her music was often characterized by an eager embrace of sounds that toed the line of ugliness and aggression, and your response to that work could be shaped by your tolerance for those qualities.
In recent years, though, Wolfe has channeled that confrontational virtuosity into expressions of social and political urgency, especially in the oratorios “Anthracite Fields,” her Pulitzer Prizewinning examination of the world of Pennsylvania coal miners, and the even more exhilarating “Fire in My Mouth,” about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911.
“Fountain of Youth,” which the composer describes as “serious fun,” is something else again. It moves with the energy and impact of a juggernaut, but there’s nothing tragic or somber about it. Instead, Wolfe seems to exult in her ability to maneuver big blocks of orchestral texture around the stage, like a titan playing with Legos.
Philip Glass is an obvious role model here, especially when Wolfe unleashes big, chunking minor chords in which that composer’s trademark 3against4 rhythms are buried deep. But there are also two breakout episodes in the course of the piece’s 11minute span — a sudden burst of funk in which the trumpets go endearingly ape, and a more traditional rock ’n’ roll break — that turn the character of the music around, transforming it into a crisp rondo.
The title of the piece is a tribute to the young musicians of the New World Symphony, who premiered “Fountain of Youth” last year. But the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony, though perhaps longer in the tooth, never missed a beat, and gave the work a vigorous, thoroughly committed performance in Davies Symphony Hall.
They did the same again at evening’s end (once past a somewhat wan account of Wagner’s “Siegfried Idyll”) with a powerful reading of Berg’s “Three Pieces for Orchestra.” This rich encapsulation of the composer’s style — at once lyrical and abrupt, emotionally direct and abstruse — has become something of a showcase for Thomas and the orchestra. Thursday’s performance boasted a robustness and clarity that not even the previous outing in 2015 could quite match.
And for sheer joyful elegance, there was pianist Emanuel Ax, whose visits to Davies never fail to bring delight. Even in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2, the fifthbest of the composer’s five exercises in the genre, Ax’s playing sparkled and danced.
He romped his way vivaciously through the outer movements, but the crown of the performance came in the slow middle movement, delivered with utmost expressive purity. “Für Elise,” that staple of beginning pianists, revealed new depths in Ax’s eloquent encore.
Wolfe seems to exult in her ability to maneuver big blocks of orchestral texture around the stage, like a titan playing with Legos.