Mahler misstep
In his first San Francisco Symphony appearance in a quarter century, Donald Runnicles manhandled an orchestral staple
Donald Runnicles is an opera conductor above all. But he’s maintained a robust career in the symphonic world as well, both during and after his spectacular 17-year stretch as music director of the San Francisco Opera. The catch is that he did it all elsewhere — in Atlanta, New York, and most recently Dresden.
So until his guest appearance with the San Francisco Symphony on Friday night — his first performance in Davies Symphony Hall since 2002 — local audiences would have been hard pressed to describe his virtues as an orchestral conductor, or to predict how the evening might unfold. Would Runnicles bring the same trademark breadth and vigor to the program of Berg and Mahler that he does to his operatic specialties of Wagner and Strauss? Or might he take a different approach, some interpretive stance unfamiliar to listeners who only know his operatic work?
I still don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I don’t know what went awry with Friday’s blunt, clattery rendition of Mahler’s First Symphony — whether it was a series of dubious interpretive choices, or some good interpretive choices that went astray in the execution, or some secret third thing. All I know is that even a conductor as brilliant as Runnicles can sometimes deliver a clumsy, deeply unpersuasive performance of standard repertoire, and he did so on this occasion.
The problems began to manifest in the opening moments of the symphony. The first movement should ideally materialize as an almost subliminal sonic presence, like the mist rising off the grassy field on an early-morning hike. (That narrative isn’t really speculative, by the way — Mahler took the music of this movement from an earlier song, “Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld,” which is about exactly that.) Mahler marks these measures triple-piano; they’re somewhere between an homage to the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth and a blatant ripoff. In most cases, the performers’ challenge is to ease inaudibly from silence to sound.
Not this time. The opening notes landed on the stage like the Kool-Aid Man breaking through a wall — “WE’RE HERE!!” — and the rest of the movement found the orchestra tromping through the fields, tamping down foliage as it went. In the second movement, Runnicles took Mahler’s overall tempo instruction (“With powerful movement, but not too fast”) and ran with it; this was music that seemed intent on simply knocking aside anything that got in its path. The slow movement, with its dark minor-key variations on “Frère Jacques,” brought an oasis of uneasy calm, with superb solos from timpanist Edward Stephan, bassist Scott Pingel, bassoonist Joshua Elmore, and tubist Jeffrey Anderson. But once Mahler’s sardonic irony came to the fore, in the klezmer-infused second section, Runnicles seemed to miss all the jokes. Most surprising was the finale, the most overtly Wagnerian part of the symphony, which suffered mysterious surges and lapses in energy.
The evening’s bright spot came during the short first half, when mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts joined Runnicles and the orchestra for a billowing, powerful account of Berg’s Seven Early Songs. All the orchestral urgency and tenderness that would later be lacking from the Mahler was there in force, and Roberts infused her part with soaring eloquence. Roberts’ most recent San Francisco appearance was in Poul Ruders’ opera The Handmaid’s Tale last fall; hearing what she can do with a shapely melodic line made me irritated all over again with that score’s vocal shortcomings.
Elsewhere:
Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “At the Opera, Runnicles could always be counted on to bring color and coherence to every gigantic work he performed. It was no surprise, then, that his account of Mahler’s First Symphony rose to exalted heights — the equal of what Bay Area audiences have heard from former music directors Michael Tilson Thomas and Esa-Pekka Salonen, both superb Mahlerians, over the last 30 years.”
Michael Strickland, Civic Center: “The Berg piece was less than 20 minutes long, followed by a 20 minute intermission, which felt a little weird. However, nobody felt cheated because the Mahler Symphony No. 1 that followed was deep, dense, and meaty enough to fill out a program on its own.”
Stephen Smoliar, The Rehearsal Studio: “Berg’s approach to orchestration was as rich as Mahler’s and decidedly more adventurous. The second of the songs was scored only for string quartet, harp, and bass, while instrumentation for the fifth song involved only winds. Since Runnicles is no stranger to vocalists, he knew exactly how to balance Roberts’ voice against the rich palette of sonorities in Berg’s score.”
This magic moment
An earlier iteration of On a Pacific Aisle during the heyday of online blogs used to include a periodic feature called “This Magic Moment,” which was dedicated to celebrating brief episodes in the standard repertoire that bring me joy — a transition, a chord, even a single note. Often these posts were prompted by me sitting in the concert hall and suddenly thinking, “Oh right, I love this bit!”
I felt that thrill again at the illustrated juncture in the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, eight measures past rehearsal number 7. To understand why, it’s worth taking a moment to chart the harmonic path of the first section of the movement, aka the exposition. (Warning: We’re about to get into the weeds a little.)
Mahler begins in the key of D major, and like his symphonic models (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert), he plans to reach the dominant key, A major, by the end of the section. Typically, that involves a process of struggle and craft.
But here’s the twist. A Mozart theme ordinarily stays in its own key, but the main theme of this movement goes to the dominant all on its own, with no effort required. So the first statement of the theme brings us immediately from D to A. Too soon! The theme repeats, which takes us from A to E, overshooting the mark. Now Mahler has to backtrack in order to finish the exposition in A. It’s not hard to do — you just need to throw in a D natural, which belongs in the key of A but not the key of E.
What’s magical, though, is the way Mahler buries that D in the orchestra. It’s just half the viola section holding a note for a couple of measures while trying to blend into the wallpaper. You don’t actually hear the D; you feel it in your gut. It’s as if a subliminal message had been sent: Hold on now, we’re about to modulate! And then we do, and it feels like something you knew was coming but didn’t know you knew.
Immigrant song
Kim’s Convenience, the engrossing and enjoyable family dramedy that opened last week at A.C.T., is the story of an immigrant family. This one is Korean and runs a small grocery in Toronto, but it could just as well have been a Jewish or Italian family in New York in the early decades of the 20th century, or a later Asian or Hispanic family in any of a number of American metropolises. In this genre, the emotional resonances remain constant across the decades.
That’s not really a criticism: Kim’s Convenience may be deeply familiar, but it’s still entertaining as hell. Playwright Ins Choi stars as the family patriarch — gruff, inflexible, and utterly infuriating, but tender and loving beneath that armored exterior. You know the drill. Choi makes a glorious comic meal out of every aspect of the character, from his impenetrable accent to his rigid views on sociology, psychology, and love. The rest of the characters — wife, son, daughter, and one guy playing everyone else — take their allotted places in the drama with well-practiced precision. There may not be many surprises, but there are more than enough episodes of uproarious humor and vulnerability to compensate.
Kim’s Convenience premiered in 2011, and went on to become the basis of a successful sitcom that ran for five seasons. That fact may help explain another odd fact about the play, which is that there’s not much drama as such. It’s all exposition. Once the characters and their basic relationships have been established, the curtain descends. It is, in other words, a television pilot episode. What happens after that? Tune in next week.
Kim’s Convenience: A.C.T., through Oct. 19. www.act-sf.org.
Elsewhere:
Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle: “Think of those heartwarming plot threads…as just an excuse for the show’s real purpose. Kim’s Convenience just wants audiences to hang out with sublimely lovable characters as they trade tit for tat and build Choi a platform to extend his incandescence.”
Quick notes
• There’s one good reason to catch the new production of Verdi’s La Traviata that opened over the weekend at Livermore Valley Opera, but it’s a doozy. As Violetta, the opera’s titular “fallen woman,” soprano Avery Boettcher delivers a powerhouse performance that combines vocal splendor, emotional depth, and magnetic stage charisma into a single irresistible package. No one else in the cast operates at her level, but she proves capable of carrying the show practically single-handedly.
Boettcher’s name is a new one to me, and it may be that this is her first appearance anywhere in the Bay Area. This is, impressively, her first time undertaking the role, yet she already has all the components of a towering interpretation at her command. On Sunday afternoon, Boettcher conjured up the glittering vocal display of Act 1 as easily as she did the tormented vulnerability of both chunks of Act 2. Most mesmerizing was her commanding traversal of Act 3, from a wrenching “Addio del passato” through Violetta’s quavering death throes. May she return again, and soon.
La Traviata: Livermore Valley Opera. Bankhead Theater, Oct. 4-5. www.livermorevalleyopera.com.
Elsewhere:
Lisa Hirsch, SFCV: “Avery Boettcher sings a splendid Violetta in Livermore Valley Opera’s production. The soprano portrays the character’s allure and complexity persuasively, and her big, dark voice is flexible enough for the role’s Act 1 vocal fireworks…All in all, a masterful performance of a great dramatic role.”
• As a countertenor, Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen devotes most of his operatic career to Baroque music (primarily Handel) and contemporary offerings. So his splendid recital on Saturday night in Berkeley’s Hertz Hall was an opportunity to savor his multifold musical gifts — including an unruffled but muscular falsetto and a richly communicative approach — in music from other stylistic worlds.
The recital, which also featured pianist John Churchwell, drew from the duo’s recent CD Uncharted. It opened with some sumptuous and rarely-heard songs by the young Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and concluded with a forthright account of Robert Schumann’s Op. 39 Liederkreis. There were songs by Brahms and Clara Schumann, and even a bit of Handel. And so as not to leave the contemporary world completely out of the picture, the recital included Oh Children, a haunting and occasionally humorous three-song cycle written for Nussbaum by Jake Heggie, to poems by Margaret Atwood on the subject of climate disaster. Each selection, in its own way, was further testimony to the brilliance and versatility that are Nussbaum’s stock-in-trade.
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #287 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Foul material for writing in pen (6)
Last week’s clue:
What you might say after Thursday’s free gift (4)
Solution: TGIF
What you might say after Thursday: definition
free: anagram indicator
gift: anagram fodder
Coming up
• Peninsula Symphony: The orchestra opens its season with a visit by the incomparable flutist Demarre McGill, who’s scheduled for double soloist duty in showpieces by the American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes (Poem) and his French coeval Jacques Ibert (the Flute Concerto). Guest conductor Lara Webber leads the orchestra in a program that also includes works by Carlos Simon, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky. Oct. 4, Heritage Theatre, Campbell; Oct. 5, San Mateo Performing Arts Center. www.peninsulasymphony.org.
• Anne Sofie von Otter: The eminent Swedish mezzo-soprano returns after too long an absence for a solo recital with fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. The program, presented by Cal Performances, is an all-Schubert affair, focused on the composer’s final song collection, known as Schwanengesang (Swan Song). In between songs, Bezuidenhout will offer selections from Schubert’s keyboard works. Oct. 5, Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley. www.calperformances.org.
the magic moment is 7 bars after rehearsal 7, not 3
This is a wonderfully incisive review, but what is perhaps most revealing is learning that you, too, have been watching 'The Studio' on Apple TV. (How else could you possibly have had the Kool-Aid man top of mind!?)