Farewell Chamber Music / Mark Alburger

An old musical programming technique is to save the biggest piece, in terms of numbers of musicians on stage, for last. But the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Music Concert on May 9 at Davies Hall took a Joseph Haydn "Farewell" approach: progressively fewer performers were left as the afternoon unfolded.

Beginning with less of a bang than may have been expected was Nathaniel Stookey's Junkestra, for a like-named ensemble of found instruments from the Norcal Recycling Center. This engagingly witty octet is in the tradition of Paul Dresher's sound sculptures, Harry Partch's microtonal instrumentarium, and the percussion-ensemble music of John Cage, Harry Partch, and Dmitri Shostakovich. While the program notes went on at length about the Gioachino Rossini William Tell Overture quote, the gallop rhythm (short-short long) seemingly could have been derived from any number of pieces, including many by Shostakovich. Certainly the ensemble was amusing to view, and amongst the more stimulating sounds were those from what seemed to be long pvc pipes -- deep and wonderful. The eight musicians, including one exclusively on musical saw, and the uncredited conductor were spot-on throughout, and the audience appreciative.

Also well-received was the Igor Stravinsky Octet (1923) for Flute, Clarinet, 2 Bassoons, 2 Trumpets, and 2 Trombones. This is composer towards the beginning of his neoclassic period, and the three movements have balance, energy, and precision in a way related to, yet far from, the Russian crowdpleasers of the previous decade or so (The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring). While it's not a fair fight, after all, to hold up a little chamber work to the massive aforementioned ballets, or even the later masterworks that he was yet to write, this piece is challenging and pleasant enough in its own way, beginning with a tune-up of trumpet, baroquish-classical fanefares of woodwinds and brass, burbling bassoons and so on. If the Tema con Variazioni second movement relies a little heavily on one particular recurring variation, so be it, perhaps as a kind of mailing-in of work that he was to do later on. The musicians carried on heroically throughout this uncompromisingly exposed and rather naked work.

Compatriot Sergei Prokofiev was next featured in his String Quartet No. 2 (1941), a music stemming from the composer's later Soviet years, of more accessible and less innovative writing. Is it a coincidence that his Violin Concerto No. 2 (1935), heard earlier this year in the same hall, bears similar imprints, and is simililarly uncharacteristically "unProkofievian"? Possibly. Violinists John Chisolm and Florin Parvulescu, violist Christina King, and cellist Barbara Andres gave it their best soloistic shots.

But far more on the mark was Maurice Ravel's great Piano Trio in A Minor, showing the composer in that war-torn year of 1914 at the height of his characteristic beauty and power, and violinist Dan Carlson, cellist Amos Yang, and pianist Solon Gordon totally up to the challenge. Here was a music of innovation and voice, wholly the composers own, in agreeable argument, poignant counterpoint, and lyrical grace. The way was clear throughout, and this smallest ensemble actually pulled off the biggest artistic bang of the proceedings.

Of course, the hopeless orchestral enthusiast in me wanted to hear all the players of the concert at once -- imagine an ensemble of flute, clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, piano, 8 found percussionsts, 3 violins, viola, and 2 celli for a resounding "Farewell!", indeed. Hmm, perhaps a local Composers Orchestra could pick up on that one...

Pieces of Perturbation / Elizabeth Agnew

Sometimes the music is so good, you feel like you are right "in the action," and that was the case when Peter Oundjian took the stage to conduct the San Francisco Symphony in Maurice Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso on October 19 at Davies Hall. The visceral excitement made one want to change careers and become a orchestra member for life.

Then again, maybe it was just the good seats -- five rows back, mid-center -- but it seemed more than this, a feeling confirmed by the powerful performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams's wartime Symphony No. 6 (1947) that concluded. Oundjian made an excellent case from the podium that, despite the composer's thou-doth-protest-too-much, the work was indeed born out of world conflict (from a 75-year-old composer whose work, like certain individuals, became "crankier" with age). To make his point, the conductor prefaced the performance with the earlier Vaughan Williams setting of Greensleeves, before launching into the symphony's first movement, which shatters all bourgeois pretence. Wow! Angry chromatic lines and rushing scales set the mood for an exercise which, while not as complex as the corresponding music in the fourth symphony, is every bit as animated, with just enough thematic development and repetition to, as the composer put it, "show that this is a Symphony, not a symphonic poem."

But it is a kind of poem -- a sonic Howl (Allen Ginsberg's work was nine years later, in related yet decidedly different socio-political circumstances) -- and the second movement rachets down and up in ominous triplet figures. The bombs drop in the scherzo, but unlike the nukes across the street at War [!] Memorial with John Adams's Dr. Atomic, these were "conventional" weaponsofmassdestruction delivered during the firestorm of London. There is even an homage to a jazz saxophonist killed in a collapsed nightclub, in the animated trio section, survived by the woodwinds at large.

The conclusion, right down to the eerie alternations of Eb major and E minor chords (they share a G, so some players hold that note, while others queasily meander back and forth between the above half-steps -- we don't know whether to be hopeful or devastated -- and devastated pretty much wins), came off as well related in Vaughan Williams's comments recorded on an old Adrian Boult album where "indeed, in some places your playing was so clear that all of my faults came to the surface -- I hope a few virtues as well. ... [It was a] wonderful performance of the Finale Epilogue . . . . It was a wonderful feat of endurance to play an absolute pianissimo . . . on end. And mind you, it was not of merely not playing loud. It was a positive, sensitive pianissimo, full of meaning and tension."

Some things endure.

"And when I say 'gentlemen,' I include the lady harpist."

And some things, mercifully, change.

Endurance and change came to mind in the interior action-packed George Gershwin Piano Concerto in F that was energetically performed by the animated Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who stomped his way through in fully memorized form. It was a testament to the high quality of this concert that this music somehow became the "slow movement," bookended by the equally demonstrative readings of Ravel and Vaughan Williams. The action simply never stopped.