concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I had tickets to two concerts while B. was gone, both of them evening events in the City. Which created a logistical difficulty, as if she's not coming home from work I have to be home to feed the cats. This shouldn't be done earlier than 5 pm, which doesn't leave much time for driving up to the City in evening traffic and finding a parking space and getting something to eat before showtime. It can be done, but it's challenging.

Fortunately for my schedule, if for nothing else, the piano recital's performer became ill and had to cancel his tour. As for the other concert, my regular Thursday SF Symphony, I decided just to skip it. While I'd have loved to have heard Emanuel Ax play the Brahms Second Concerto, that wasn't enough by itself, and I wasn't drawn to the second piece, Zemlinsky's enormous Straussian tone poem The Mermaid. I'd heard that once on the radio, and once was enough.

Then on Friday I got, as I sometimes do, a call from my editor. Other plans had fallen through, and since I'm usually available, he's turned to me to review the SF Symphony. Often enough my response is, "I just heard that last night," and I can write a review on the spot. Other times, of course, I have to go to one of the later performances.

This time I was glad I hadn't gone. I don't think I would have been able to give The Mermaid a fair or knowledgeable review without having given it some extra attention. So I scheduled myself for the Sunday matinee, both because B. would be back by then and to give myself time to study this monster. I re-read the H.C. Andersen fairy tale on which the music turns out to be very closely based, and I listened to a recording with score, which confirmed for me what I had disliked about the work.

Which put me in a good position not just to evaluate the work, but to appreciate the specific virtues of Andrey Boreyko's conducting of it. I wrote most of the review in my head while walking down to dinner afterwards, and it was merely a matter of remembering my wording.

I was very happy to hit upon the word "grandiloquent" to describe this genre of music. That combines several different words I'd have used to describe it into one adjective. The wording implies Zemlinsky aimed at this quality deliberately, and I seriously think he did, given that what I'd call grandiloquence he'd consider a virtue.

I'm equally pleased with "warm vibrancy" for the cello solo in the Brahms, as a polite description of a style of cello playing I don't care for.