concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I had given some thought to getting a ticket to last week's SFS concerts, but decided not to bother, until my editors pinged me at the last minute and asked me to review it. (I'm almost always available, so I make a good backup when the regular people have to cancel.)

I am so glad I went. I have rarely enjoyed a new work, even by the same composer, as much as I did the Piano Concerto by Mason Bates. I remember how skeptical I was of his work when I first heard it 15 years ago, and then of how each subsequent new work has improved vastly. The great part of sitting in the reviewer seats in the VIP section of the main floor is that I was literally right in front of Mason Bates. When his piece ended I got immediately to my feet, turned around, and said, "That was your best work yet!"

So I want to assure you that I drafted my review entirely from my notes and memories without any outside influence, because only then did I read Kosman's review in the Chronicle. To no surprise from me, he didn't like the concerto, but he was impressed by the other new work, by Lotta Wennäkoski, in a way that I was not. So I added a few comments that, without saying so explicitly, are a direct reply to Kosman.

What bothered Kosman about the concerto was that it presented itself as a little tour through musical history without sounding much like the periods it was intended to show. Well, I'd figured out that it wasn't supposed to, and already had that in the review, saying among else that "Bates is writing not pastiche but impressions." What I added to that was the comment that "listeners who find the concept distracting should ignore it; it will only confuse them." That listener I'm referring to is Kosman, the point being that he's hung up on the concerto not being what it's not trying to be.

Not only had I noted that the orchestra didn't sound much like the historical periods, but the piano was even less so. When I wrote that in one movement the piano was "at least as reminiscent of cool jazz-pop pianism as of anything older," I was thinking of Vince Guaraldi, but I didn't mention his name both to save space and because he's one of the few composers in that style I know. Another section, I said, was "of a soft-jazz cast," of which all I need say is that before the term "new age music" was invented, "soft jazz" is what it was usually called.

What made me sure that Kosman was being intellectually dishonest was his claim that "the opening movement is less reminiscent of the actual Renaissance than of second-tier imitations by such 1970s prog-rock bands as, well, Renaissance." In the first place, there's not enough Renaissance-era evocations in Bates's piece to justify this kind of differentiation. In the second, I know the work of the prog-rock band Renaissance, I know it very well, and despite their name they did not go around imitating Renaissance-era music. That's a cheap shot, and an ignorant one.

On the other hand, Kosman was enraptured by Wennäkoski's use of a theme from an opera by the earlier Finnish composer Ida Moberg. This didn't work for me. I'd already written that the full presentation of Moberg's theme was undigested and didn't fit with the remainder of Wennäkoski's work. In reply to Kosman's remark about Wennäkoski quoting the theme in her own melodic fragments, I added, "if the listener doesn’t know it thoroughly, then the references mean no more than the implications in the Bates." So there. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and their own judgment, but somebody has hold of these works entirely by the wrong end of the stick, and I don't think it's me.