concerts three

For the fourth time in the last couple of years, SFCV has sent me up to review a new piano concerto at the San Francisco Symphony. This one is by another old pal of EPS, Anders Hillborg. I didn't like it as much as the headline my editors put on the article implies (or than Joshua Kosman of the Chronicle did), but it was OK. I did like some of the comments Hillborg made at the pre-concert talk. In describing how this work is more accessible than his previous piano concerto of over 20 years ago, he said,

"When I was a young composer, 'accessibility' was a naughty word. You weren't supposed to have an audience, that's bad."

And there it is again testified to by another who had to live through it, the modernist hegemony that revisionists are so insistent did not exist.

That was Thursday. Sunday was a two-concert day. First I couldn't resist going to the Saratoga High School auditorium in the afternoon for a performance by the Saratoga Symphony, a local putt-putt orchestra, of the rare and enormous Busoni Piano Concerto. As conductor Jason Klein explained (in his disconcertingly Nixonian manner) before the concert, they'd already planned for this to be the local premiere of the work before SFS put it on their schedule for last spring. But ... they went ahead anyway. "And SFS doesn't let you in for free, do they?" The title on the program book was "Twice In A Lifetime."

And it was pretty good. The orchestra at least emitted coherent and Busonisque sounds, if lacking in an overall thread. Pianist Tamami Honma had complete command of her difficult part and was audible throughout, which also made her sound more coherent than SFS's Igor Levit. And the whole thing was over in 70 minutes, which is a pretty fast clip for this piece.

That gave me enough time for a reasonable dinner halfway between Saratoga and Willow Glen, where the San José Chamber Orchestra was playing in a church at 7 pm. This one I was also reviewing, though it was a little outside of my preferred repertoire. The Mozart Sinfonia Concertante is a work I could live without, but at least soloists and orchestra all played it very well. The two Mexican works for string orchestra it was paired with were new to me. When I listened to them beforehand, I found Manuel Ponce's Estampas nocturnas a little dull, but the live performance turned out to be attractive and even a bit moving. It was Javier Álvarez's Metro Chabacano, a bustling little piece in a Karl Jenkins minimalist style, that charmed me on recording but turned out to be sluggish live - because they played it without a conductor. Don't do that.