Music Lane

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on January 19, 2015 at 20:47:04

My wife Madeline has chickened out of having me post her description of the concert we attended last Friday, because we know people in that orchestra ("Symphony Silicon Valley" - jeez I hate that name!), and she's afraid someone we know will see her comments. (She actually wrote it, but doesn't want to post it until much later.) So maybe I'll take a crack at it in the meantime, in as discreet a manner as I can muster:

We were there to see our friend Jon Nakamatsu play a couple of Gershwin works (Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue). Of course, he already has a recording of this music with the Rochester Philharmonic on Harmonia Mundi - a recording which I believe has been very successful as classical recordings go. Jon played very well indeed, but the orchestra. . . well, maybe not so much.

"Symphony Silicon Valley" is the low-budget successor to the San Jose Symphony (which, BTW, was an even older orchestra than the SF Symphony), and has been in existence for about 13 years - ever since the San Jose Symphony unfortunately folded. It would be nice to have a well funded, richly endowed orchestra in the San Jose area, but, of all the orchestras in Northern California, only the San Francisco Symphony lives on a big budget, big endowment right now - and I think that's too bad. This is a very wealthy area, and there's no reason why we couldn't support more than a single international-class orchestra.

Many of the same players who were in the SJ Symphony are currently in the SSV, and over this period of time, I'm sure the average age of the orchestra members must have increased significantly. When one attends concerts now, one notices that many more of the players simply appear to be old. For instance, in Ravel's "La Valse", which concluded the concert, you could notice the six percussion players standing toward the back of the stage (as would be normal), but five of the six players looked as if they were in their seventies, with a couple maybe even in their eighties. It's a similar situation in the other sections of the orchestra: lots of old players, although maybe not quite so old as in the percussion section.

Many listeners here subscribe to the notion that, as a musician gets older, his musical insights grow deeper and more profound, even if technical matters may be less in hand. On Friday, I'm afraid we heard more evidence of the problems and less of the insights.

It's also hard to guess how the rehearsal time may have been distributed, and for the opening work on the program, Ravel's "Bolero", maybe the conductor (Ward Stare, a boy-babe just appointed as the new music director of the Rochester Philharmonic) figured that this was a piece which "plays itself" and which didn't need much rehearsal time. The two live performances of "Bolero" I've seen (this one, and one about 30 years ago with the SF Symphony and Edo De Waart) have both seemed strange in that the players' attention seems to wander, and baffling mistakes (unrelated to the actual difficulty of the music) begin to appear. At the beginning of the piece, the whole gi-normous string section is just sitting there, pretty much doing nothing. But in Friday's performance, one of the second violinists (violins were divided left and right) was really into the parts where she wasn't playing: she started grooving to the music with all sorts of body English, while her violin was just resting on her leg. Meanwhile, her stand partner didn't seem to be into the music to nearly the same extent, and let out a couple of BIG yawns until she started playing. So there were the two stand partners, one grooving away and the other yawning away.



But there was also a strange atmosphere to the whole performance: nothing seemed settled and in the many solos in woodwinds toward the beginning, most of the players seemed oddly ill at ease. The rhythms were slightly off and the accentuation (which, on the face of it, should have been pretty straightforward) would have these odd clumsy-sounding moments, although nothing major went wrong. Well. . . almost nothing major. Towards the end of the piece, the tension gathered and the dynamic level increased, and everyone was anticipating Bo Derek and the pounding climax - oops! I mean they were anticipating THE modulation. Unfortunately, the tympani player was anticipating it a bit too much, and gave us a mighty thwack (BIG change in dynamic level) on the measure BEFORE the actual key change! Oops - it's hard to hide when you've made a miscalculation on the cymbals or tympany! When the performance ended, Madeline and I were almost doubled over with laughter, even as most of the rest of the audience whooped and hollered. (A more sure-fire audience pleaser than "Bolero" is hard to imagine!)

The fun only continued in the Concerto in F, even if it was less continuous than in the "Bolero" performance. For instance, in the second movement, the solo trumpet decided he was going to embellish his line (in true HIP jazz fashion?). However, the embellishments soon got out of control and the solo ended with some weirdly approximate pitches. Of course, Jon saved the day with his impeccable and professional playing which soon put matters right.

I don't want to catalog everything, so I'll move on to the Rhapsody in Blue. Of course, everyone knows the famous clarinet solo which starts off the piece. And it seems as if there's a rivalry among clarinettists as to who can make the most lurid slide up to that high note at the top of the run. Well, the slide we heard on Friday was plenty lurid for me, but the goal high note was accompanied by an unmistakeable squeak. Not the worst squeak I've ever heard, but unmistakeable nonetheless. Again, it took Jon to calm things down and get everything moving in the right direction. The finale was as exciting as it should be.

So, all in all, this was a most ENTERTAINING concert. And, to be fair to the orchestra, this may have just been "one of those nights". I'm sure the players played much better when the program was repeated on Saturday and Sunday. My impression of the conductor was that his beat was very clear, and I'm kind of doubting that the players' lapses could be traced back to him. It was just one of those funny things in life! ;-)

p.s.: I of course include myself among those who are getting older, and as a manifestation of this, I should say that Jon and I had a 2-piano rehearsal of the Concerto in F on the same day I had a rehearsal with Christine, the cellist I just played a concert with last week. Unfortunately, that was the day I forgot to bring my glasses to the rehearsal - both of them, the one with Christine and the one with Jon. It's like this: you get old and you forget things! ;-)