Friday night, Jon and I were at the San Francisco Symphony for what turned out to be a particularly fine musical experience. The program could have been less than exciting: “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” Liszt’s 2nd Piano Concerto, and Holst’s “The Planets.” I like them all, but all of them get played often enough that they are in danger of being overfamiliar.
The pianist was Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom I had heard of but had not heard perform. And a young German conductor named Christian Reif replaced Charles Dutoit. Between them, everything in the program became new. The experience felt much the way Leonard Bernstein’s fabled first performance with the NY Philharmonic must have felt. I went directly from not knowing what to expect to being blown away. The San Francisco players responded magnificently and there was not a moment of perfunctory playing in the whole evening.
The opening “Rhine-Journey” offered a premonition of things to come. It was beautifully nuanced, with every detail standing out clearly. And it never lost its sense of continuity and movement.
The Liszt was amazing. Since numbers on works seldom mean much to me (and I’m not a great fan of concertos in general), I wasn’t actually too sure whether I’d heard it before. The opening bars reminded me that, whether I’d heard it live or not, I’d heard it repeatedly on broadcasts. But there was never a moment in the piece when my attention began to fade. Even the soloist’s most demanding passages were true music, never just excuses for showing off. The rapport between soloist and conductor seemed perfect. I hope to hear M. Bavouzet many times in the future.
And “The Planets”. . . . I’ve probably heard this work as many times as any big orchestral piece in the whole repertoire. When I was still a child, I found a special bond with the early twentieth-century English composers, Holst among them. And the recording by Adrian Boult was my introduction to this work. I had heard Dutoit conduct it both in recordings and, once, live. And I liked what I heard when he last conducted the San Francisco Symphony in it. His rendition had tremendous energy and drive.
Oddly enough, though, I realized that I hadn’t been looking forward to hearing him conduct it again. This happened before the questions raised recently about his character and behavior. It was a musical rather than a moral shift. What I remembered from his previous performance was, as I said, intensity and drive—at a level perhaps more suitable to Orff’s Carmina Burana, which has some wonderful music in it, but also an undercurrent of sheer brutality that I find offputting as I get older. The intensity and drive tended to flatten out or conceal the complexity and variety of the music itself.
Reif’s interpretation had as much energy and drive as Dutoit’s. “Mars” was brutal, as it should be. Given the new awareness of the experience of World War I that I have been acquiring during the centennial period, I’m amazed that the British audience manage to endure this passage in 1920—or that Holst could have written it just before the war, not yet knowing precisely what it would mean.
But, in addition to intensity and drive, Reif’s interpretation had perfect nuance. “Venus” was deeply and mysteriously attractive, not merely delicate. “Mercury” sounded like a true god for our era of digital communication, speeding along with indifference as to exactly what the message might be. (For that matter, that was pretty much the Mercury/Hermes of ancient Greece and Rome.)
“Jupiter” had posed a bit of a problem for me for many years: how to connect all that romping “jollity” with the noble hymnic passage in the middle? At some point, the thought had struck me that, well, Holst was British; the model was the festivity surrounding some great royal birthday or wedding. And, in any case, Jupiter is King of the Gods. But Reif made more of it than that. The hymn was revealed as jollity transcendent, the kind of joy that one experiences in moments of exaltation, moments of love, moments of aesthetic significance, moments of religious depth. But such moments can never continue indefinitely, and the return to more ordinary sorts of jollity reminds us that it is all on a continuum.
“Saturn” lost nothing by coming on the heels of that. For one so young, Reif seemed to grasp old age in both its limitations and its lengthened perspective, its beauty and its threats. “Uranus” bounced about like the supreme master of sleight of hand. “Neptune” was transcendent. The women’s chorus was flawless. And Reif continued “conducting” the silence just briefly after the chorus fell silent, a wonderful device for allowing the audience to “hear” the silence as part of the music.
Perhaps the thing that most seemed to characterize the whole performance was Reif’s combination of architectural mastery in each of these pieces with an unembarrassed embrace of their wide range of emotion. Emotion, not sentimentality. Emotion compromises a vast portion of our human knowledge of our world. Some strands of modern music-making seem to have wanted to erase it and replace it with something more narrowly rational or to reduce it to a narrower range, emphasizing dread, brutality, arrogance, anger and so forth. Emotion has been dismissed at times as “sentimentality.” But “sentimentality'” isn’t simply a reflection or expression of our emotional lives. It’s an exploitation of them. With Reif, we heard human emotion expressed, never exaggerated, never falsely aroused, never utilized for ulterior purposes. There was always an element of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.”