SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Adams, Mozart, Cowell: Gil Shaham (violin), Michael Tilson Thomas (conductor), San Francisco Symphony, Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco. 11.12.2010 (HS)

It was a momentous day for music, particularly American music, in March 1985 when the San Francisco Symphony premiered Harmonielehre, a new piece for orchestra by John Adams. The composer had already caught the attention of sharp-eared followers of contemporary fare with such works as Shaker Loops, Harmonium and Grand Pianola Music. Although he was generally lumped in with minimalists such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, one could always sense a restlessness in Adams’ output, a desire to shake off the shackles of an imposed style.

 

With Harmonielehre, written for an outsized orchestra and named after a treatise on music by Arnold Schönberg, Adams found a way to meld the chugging rhythms and ostinatos of minimalism with the grand sweep of Romantic melodies and harmonies, the sting of pungent dissonances and complex formal structures. More important than any of these academic musical concerns, he discovered a way to connect with musical audiences, and not just the traditional classical patrons. He did it with big, bold gestures, heart-on-sleeve Romanticism and colorful orchestrations.

 

And boy howdy, did he ever connect. The listeners at that premiere erupted with unrestrained enthusiasm. There was a sense that the door had opened into a whole new musical world, a world that was accessible and welcoming, and, damn it, fun, but without a shred of condescension or dumbing down. With Harmonielehre to open those doors, he would go on to write the operas Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic, the emotion-drenched orchestra pieces Naive and Sentimental Music, On the Transmigration of Souls and My Father Knew Charles Ives—not to mention the oratorio El Niño presented last week.

 

San Francisco Symphony has revived Harmonielehre several times in the quarter-century since its debut under Edo de Waart, then music director of the orchestra, who had brought Adams on board as composer-in-residence. (That was a new idea at the time, too.) Most memorably, Adams himself led a series of wonderful performances in 2000.

 

This time, under music director Michael Tilson Thomas, the results were muscular, startling in their dynamics and color, exuding confidence and, yes, a sense of pride. Fortunately, the microphones were in place and the tape rolling to capture all this for the orchestra’s own label. Heard Saturday in the final concert of four this week, there was no doubt that this was great music played by an ensemble that simply reveled in it.

 

The gleaming sound of the expanded brass section enunciating those opening E-flat minor chords, the atmospheric arpeggios from the woodwinds, piano and mallet percussion and later, the broad sweep of the strings, created as much of a sense of occasion as a Mahler symphony would. Tilson Thomas judged tempos securely, shifted meter seamlessly and framed dynamics beautifully.

 

The broad expanse of the opening movement seemed to lift off like some gigantic space ship, dripping energy. The slow second movement, titled “Anfortas Wound,” almost reached stasis as its flow hardened into a molten sadness, as unrelentingly honest and clear-eyed as any performance of this music I have heard. That darkness only set up the brilliance of the finale, with its fluttering woodwinds, jingling percussion and floating chords that eventually coalesce into a battle between A-flat and B-flat. Ultimately B-flat triumphs in glory.

 

Something about the raw energy of this music also seeped into the first half of the program, which featured the violinist Gil Shaham in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major. Delicate and tidy it was not. Although both Shaham and Tilson Thomas executed the music accurately, they approached the piece with wit and almost operatic emotion. That, come to think of it, may not be far off from Mozart’s own approach when he played it.

 

The music does have its surprises, including the violin’s unexpectedly slow Adagio entrance after the typical Allegro orchestra opening, and in the finale, several sudden descents into a minor key that call to mind some of the angry moments in Mozart’s operas. Soloist and conductor took full advantage of those passages to dig a little harder. The results were colorful, if not exactly immaculate.

 

Tilson Thomas opened the concert with Synchrony, a 12-minute piece for an outsized orchestra written in 1930 by Henry Cowell (perhaps best known for championing the music of Charles Ives). The work opens with a long solo for muted trumpet, eloquently played by the orchestra’s principal Mark Inouye. The rest, with its tone clusters and ladled-on percussion, only demonstrated how much more persuasive Adams was with similar means, 55 years later.

 

Harvey Steiman

 

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