It gives you pause
With a newly commissioned premiere, the Santa Rosa Symphony found a new approach to Mahler’s Second
The score of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the “Resurrection,” includes a very specific instruction from the composer: Between the first and second movement, he says, there should be a pause of “at least five minutes.” Easy to say, harder to accomplish. I don’t think I can recall a performance of this piece in which the pause was observed and also had an effect that made you think, “OK, I see what he was going for.”
Typically, the audience is just left perplexed. Five minutes is a long time to sit in silence in the middle of an orchestral concert. It feels even longer if you’re not sure what’s going on, and nearly every audience member will be unsure what’s going on. There’s no simple way for the orchestra to signal This is all going according to plan. People squirm in their seats, they look around, they wonder if someone is having a medical emergency in the upper balcony. Often, the five-minute pause gets whittled down, or is simply dispensed with.
For this weekend’s concerts at the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park, the Santa Rosa Symphony and music director Francesco Lecce-Chong adopted an intriguing new approach to the pause problem: They put a full intermission between the first and second movements. Then they commissioned the American composer Jonathan Leshnoff to write a short curtain-raiser, a 10-minute work for soprano, chorus, and orchestral that sets excerpts from Mahler’s letters. And there you had it — a “Resurrection” Symphony with a big break where the composer wanted it, done without upsetting the balance of a full concert plan.
Conceptual ingenuity, however, gets you only part of the way there. If Sunday’s matinee performance, the second of three in the run, was never less than engaging, it also never quite lived up to all the possibilities inherent in the plan. Lecce-Chong and the orchestra, together with the SSU Symphony Chorus led by Jenny Bent, conjured up great swells of sound and emotion at the symphony’s climactic moments—especially in the first and last movements, the mammoth tent-pegs between which Mahler’s musical structure is strung.
But in the intervening sections, including the entire second movement, the performance seemed to lag — not so much through Lecce-Chong’s tempo choices as through his inability to infuse gentler passages with a sense of tensile inevitability. Too much of the performance was spent marking time in anticipation of the big blowouts. Leshnoff’s piece, titled “Warum hast du gelitten?” (“Why have you suffered?”), is a creditable Mahler pastiche, with plenty of harp-and-strings textures out of the famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, and harmonic sequences that the master would have recognized as his own. Yet there wasn’t much in this world premiere to support the notion that faux Mahler is something we stand in need of.
The most rewarding contributions came from the vocal soloists. Soprano Esther Tonea brought luminous clarity and precision to Leshnoff’s piece, a foretaste of the qualities that would return some 90 minutes later in the finale of the Mahler. In the “Urlicht” movement, mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Beteag sang with a chesty radiance that felt like an embodiment of the poem. Together, their efforts acted as a seal of grace on the entire undertaking.
Elsewhere:
Lisa Hirsch, SFCV: “Different conductors take different approaches to Mahler’s music, and that’s as it should be. But Lecce-Chong’s conception of the work was never clear.”
Music of the mountains
The American composer Ben Shirley brings with him both a keenly inventive musical palette and an affecting life story. After spending his early years as a rock bassist, Shirley fell prey to alcohol and drug addiction, and spent an extended period living in a homeless shelter on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. Composition, including a stint on scholarship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, helped him pull through.
Shirley’s High Sierra Sonata, a tuneful and ingratiating musical travelogue through the mountains of California, was the centerpiece and (aptly) the high point of a program by clarinetist Anthony McGill and the Pacifica Quartet, presented by San Francisco Performances last Tuesday, Dec. 3, in Herbst Theatre. This 20-minute score, commissioned by the performers, spins out long, sweet-hued melodies, bringing the listener along in a virtual trek through mountainous terrain. The sun comes up and casts shadows in unexpected places; wind and rain put in an appearance, only to give way again to a plausible bliss, all captured in Shirley’s writing. McGill and the Pacifica are longtime collaborators, and you could hear the ease and closeness of their interactions throughout. (American Stories, the 2022 recording on the Çedille label, includes Shirley’s piece alongside recent music by other American composers.)
The Pacifica has emerged over its 30-year history as an ensemble that is both adventurous (including a complete tour of Elliott Carter’s string quartets) and eloquent. Dvorák’s “American” Quartet began the evening with an air of boisterous exuberance. More rewarding still was the concluding performance of Brahms’ autumnal Clarinet Quartet, in which the rich athleticism of McGill’s playing melded beautifully with the quartet’s communal dexterity.
Elsewhere:
Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “[High Sierra Sonata] is a lovely, moving piece and should easily earn a place in the clarinet quintet repertory.”
Michael Strickland, Civic Center: “The three-movement High Sierra Sonata is a consistently pretty, tuneful work that sounded a bit like an extension of Dvorak's American scene painting.”
Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio: “Whatever the impact of the setting may have been, the music itself reminded me of my composition teacher’s favorite derogatory assessment: ‘noodling.’”
Also this week
The San Francisco Symphony gave its annual performance of Handel’s Messiah, and it was not good. The Seattle early music conductor Stephen Stubbs, who has done excellent work here once or twice over the years, led a sluggish, meandering performance on Saturday night, in which lassitude was offered in place of meditative depth. The four vocal soloists, all making debuts with the Symphony, were variously uninspiring. I slipped away at intermission, seeing no reason to believe that even the “Hallelujah!” Chorus was likely to shake the evening from its torpor.
The one bright spot was the work of the Symphony Chorus, which has sprung to life under the guidance of director Jenny Wong. That may or may not be a lasting accomplishment, given that the orchestra’s management seems intent on slashing the chorus’ budget to smithereens. But at least for the moment, the Symphony still has an excellent chorus to draw upon for events like this, and the group’s shapely, pointed contributions were a reminder of why its presence is so valuable.
Elsewhere:
Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio: “This was a performance that was definitely ‘one for the books’; hopefully, Stubbs will return to Davies to present us with more of his repertoire.”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #245 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Wharton’s short cut (4)
Last week’s clue:
Helpful tip: After decapitation, cry of pain is connected (2,5)
Solution: IN TOUCH
Helpful tip: HINT
after decapitation: delete the first letter => INT
cry of pain: OUCH
connected: definition
Coming up
• Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale: The estimable Bay Area early music ensemble has been renowned for years for its mastery of Handel’s music, but a lot of that was attributable to the talents and interests of its longtime artistic director, Nicholas McGegan. As the group looks for a new conductor following the departure of Richard Egarr, McGegan’s successor, the music of Bach may begin to play a larger role in its repertoire choices. This week’s program, led by guest conductor Ruben Valenzuela, features two Bach cantatas, along with music by his lesser-known contemporary Christoph Graupner. Tenor Nicholas Phan, a last-minute stand-in for the originally scheduled soprano Sherezade Panthaki, is the vocal soloist. Dec. 11-13, Stanford, San Francisco, and Berkeley. www.philharmonia.org.
• Chanticleer: One of the Bay Area’s indispensable Yuletide traditions is the annual Christmas concert by this men’s chorus. As with nearly everything the group does, the repertoire is wide and varied, including music of the Renaissance, jazz and popular numbers, Christmas carols both old and new, and a host of seasonal surprises. Dec. 12-23, Stanford, Petaluma, Oakland, Sacramento, Mill Valley, Santa Clara, Berkeley, and San Francisco. www.chanticleer.org.
• Asmik Grigorian: The Lithuanian soprano, enthusiastically acclaimed earlier this year for her Metropolitan Opera debut in the title role of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, is now due to make her first appearance in the Bay Area. For her Cal Performances recital, accompanied by pianist Lukas Geniušas, she’s crafted an all-Russian program featuring music of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Dec. 15, Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley. www.calperformances.org.