The “Goldberg” standard
In a last-minute substitution, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson delivered a tremendous rendition of Bach’s keyboard masterpiece
The outstanding event of my musical week wasn’t anything I’d planned on. For that matter, no one saw it coming. Sunday night’s Great Performers Series concert, presented by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall, was supposed to be a duo recital by two of the leading young pianists of our time, Yuja Wang and Víkingur Ólafsson, with a fascinating program that included music by Berio, Adams, Nancarrow, and, for some reason, Rachmaninoff. But just hours before curtain, Wang came down with some kind of infection on her finger and couldn’t perform. So it was left to Ólafsson to carry the evening alone, with a performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations that was nothing short of electrifying.
Thank heaven for serendipity.
Thank heaven, too, for the god of second chances. Ólafsson has been immersed in the Goldbergs for the past couple of years, touring the piece internationally with some 90 or so performances, and releasing a Grammy-winning recording. He brought the piece to Cal Performances last year, where I seem to have skipped it because I’m an idiot. (You can read Simon Cohen’s splendid review of that performance here.) Now I know what I missed.
Ólafsson, like Wang, combines a ferocious keyboard technique with a razor-sharp intellect that puts those gifts to powerful interpretive use. (Most virtuosos can boast one or the other of these abilities; few can lay claim to both.) Each section of the Goldbergs — a theme, 30 variations, and a return of the original theme — constitutes its own musical and expressive world, and in each one you could feel Ólafsson approaching the segment like a brilliant mechanic, assessing which tools would be most useful for the job at hand.
Sometimes that meant slowing everything down in order to shine a light on the music’s inner workings, and sometimes it meant tearing through a variation so that it registered as scarcely more than a harmonic blur. The textures were now fluid and languorous, now brusque and percussive. Ólafsson often underlined the music’s imitative counterpoint — every third variation in the piece is a canon at a different melodic interval, because Bach sometimes like to serve up a little reminder that he’s Bach and you’re not — but occasionally he just let it sit in the background. In the 15th Variation, which is not only a canon but a canon in contrary motion, with the melodies splaying outward from each other, Ólafsson picked out each note for contemplation, as if he were performing some kind of microsurgery. In the 20th Variation, with its elaborate hiccup-like rhythms and bouncy hand crossings, he ushered listeners along swiftly, as if to say, Don’t get bogged down in the details, that’s not what’s important here.
The Goldbergs begin with a simple theme, marked “Aria,” and conclude with a repetition of the same music — more or less. The notes are the same, but the effect is ideally miles apart, and I’ve rarely heard the contrast drawn with the kind of heart-wrenching subtlety that Ólafsson imparted to it. There was a note of nostalgia in the final return (remember how simple things used to be?) as well as a feeling of sublime accomplishment (look how far we’ve come in just the past 90 minutes!). One felt a bit of sympathy, perhaps, for anyone who’d come to Davies specifically to hear Wang and Ólafsson in combination. But no one who stayed for the substitute offering could have gone away disappointed.
Elsewhere:
Gabe Meline, KQED: “In variation No. 5, [Ólafsson’s] hands performed like electrocuted spiders, jumping over each other with twittering fingers as legs. On challenging variations like No. 14, those fingers competed for real estate on the piano keys with the cutthroat determination of someone trying to rent a place in North Beach.”
Gary Kamiya, Kamiya Unlimited: “If you see a bunch of classical music lovers wandering around town today with neck braces, there’s a reason. Last night the audience at the San Francisco Symphony suffered about as a severe case of aesthetic whiplash as it’s possible to have — a massive disappointment followed by an artistic triumph.”
Quiet flows the Don
If there’s an operatic character more simpering and weaselly than Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, I’m not sure who it might be (although Gunther in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung would certainly be in the running). In nearly every production of the opera, he stands ineffectually on the sidelines, assuring his beloved Donna Anna that he will help comfort her, reclaim her honor, and avenge her dead father, while assiduously doing nothing of the sort. Many’s the time I have wanted to reach across the footlights and slap the fool silly.
Among the pleasant surprises in the production of Don Giovanni that opened a two-week run at Livermore Valley Opera on Saturday night was the way tenor David Walton reconceived the role. Instead of piping gracefully through the part, Walton sang it with robust fearlessness, making Ottavio suddenly sound like a Verdian hero instead of a useless whiner. Suddenly it was possible to believe, against all evidence, that he really would find the man who had killed Donna Anna’s father and exact some kind of retribution.
That burst of ferocity was welcome in a performance that was full of vocal splendors — particularly from sopranos Meryl Dominguez as a brilliantly fiery Donna Anna and Phoebe Chee as a sweet-toned Zerlina, and from bass-baritone Samuel Weiser as Leporello — but a bit low on kinetic energy. Some of that was unavoidable, since baritone Titus Muzi III, in the title role, sprained an ankle during the final dress rehearsal and wound up working with a cane. Yet director Robert Herriot left too much of the action uncharacterized, and the conducting of music director Alexander Katsman, though often elegantly shaped, didn’t always help the cast hit their marks with the requisite precision.
Don Giovanni: Bankhead Theater, Livermore, through March 9. www.livermorevalleyopera.com.
Elsewhere:
Lisa Hirsch, SFCV: “With a uniformly good cast and crisp conducting from Music Director Alexander Katsman, the opera moved swiftly and coherently from the dark opening of the overture to the brief wrap-up following the title character’s demise.”
Quick hits
• Local audiences were introduced to the Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron in the San Francisco Symphony’s incendiary 2023 performances of the late Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater. That was enough to raise expectations around Barron’s San Francisco Performances recital on Feb. 26, and the event, in Herbst Theatre, made good on every promise.
Barron’s partner was the superb Indian American pianist Kunal Lahiry, and the two of them assembled a program that was both riveting and revelatory. Titled The Power and the Glory, the event contemplated the myriad ways in which colonialism and art can intersect — from the Chinoiserie of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and the use of the indigenous Quechua language in Messiaen’s Harawi to a variety of adaptations of Indian and Chinese folk material. The evening included a wonderful song commissioned from the young Iranian American composer Kian Ravaei, with purling piano figuration and broad, shapely melodies; a haunting lament written by Ilse Weber in the Nazi prison camp of Theresienstadt; and two gorgeously sung excerpts from Xavier Montsalvatge’s Cinco Canciones Negras, a cycle that can sometimes seem overexposed but that found new life in Barron and Lahiry’s exquisite renditions.
• I wasn’t especially interested in this week’s San Francisco Symphony program, which featured Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. But it marked the return of the English conductor Robin Ticciati, whose 2023 Symphony debut left me seriously underwhelmed, and I felt it was only fair to try again, in case that earlier program had been a fluke.
It wasn’t. Just like last time, Ticciati’s conducting left both pieces sounding flabby and boneless, as if crisp rhythms and expressivity were mutually exclusive assets. I appreciated the eloquent debut of pianist Francesco Piemontesi in the Beethoven, especially during the sonorous strains of the opening movement. But Ticciati’s conducting was all over the place, and the Rachmaninoff suffered. Lisa Hirsch (“The whole thing felt loose around the edges, without a lot of forward momentum and pulse…”) and I are in full agreement.
• Last week I expressed concern about the future of the Emerging Black Composers Project, the important DEI initiative sponsored by the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, given the undisguised racism that has now become official U.S. government policy. Sure enough, within days the program had been put on pause. Follow me for similarly reliable stock tips, all based on the amazingly simple heuristic that this regime will always do the worst possible thing at any juncture. The weapon in use is evidently federal funding to the Conservatory, which could be in jeopardy if the school doesn’t toe the line. Lily Janiak has the full story.
In all honesty, I didn’t expect this to blow up quite so quickly. I figured it would take more than 30 seconds for the evil effects of the government to impinge on this comparatively small entry in the general ledger of Let’s Try to Do Something to Combat Injustice. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
Cryptic clue of the week
Just in time for this week’s opening of Yasmina Reza’s play “Art” at Shotgun Players comes a clue from Out of Left Field #257 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Flaw in white painting, say (4)
Last week’s clue:
Like a cello or bass: outstanding (5)
Solution: BOWED
Like a cello: definition
bass: B
outstanding: OWED
Coming up
The Pigeon Keeper: Opera Parallèle, the San Francisco outfit that has emerged as the one of the region’s leading purveyors of contemporary opera, presents the world premiere of a magical realist fable by composer David Hanlon and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. The ensemble cast is led by artistic and general director Nicole Paiement, with direction by Brian Staufenbiel. March 7-9, Cowell Theater. www.operaparallele.org.
SF Musicians for LA: In response to the devastation wrought by January’s wildfires throughout Southern California, the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music have organized a benefit concert, with proceeds going to two relief organizations. Edwin Outwater conducts the program of works by Copland, Rachmaninoff and Dvořák, with Garrick Ohlsson as the piano soloist. March 8, Davies Symphony Hall. www.sfsymphony.org.
Your reviews are my islands of sanity.
BTW I loved The Pigeon Keeper and hope you did, too.
I attended the duo recital at Carnegie with Ólafsson and Wang. The evening had a 'special event' vibe (packed house, selfies in front of the two-piano setup). They balanced each other beautifully in terms of temperament, and I particularly enjoyed the works by Berio, Nancarrow, Pärt, and Adams. I regret I missed Ólafsson's Goldberg performance last year and after reading your review, it looks like I'll have to purchase the album!