The visit of the San Francisco Symphony under their principal chief
conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, was one of the highlights of this
year's Edinburgh Festival and part of a programming strand featuring
American music and musicians.
In the opening performance, they showcased a work commissioned for
the orchestra's centenary in 2012, John Adams' Absolute Jest.
This work pays homage to Beethoven and in particular the late
quartets, which are heavily quoted. However it creates a very new
musical experience by having a string quartet – here the St
Lawrence Quartet – performing with full symphony orchestra. No
one player is a soloist in the conventional concerto sense, nor even
in the way that the solo parts of a double concerto are distributed;
the quartet is collectively one but a many-layered voice, which passes
the melodic lead between the orchestra and itself as well as between
its players. Hence the work looks forward as well as back; it creates
a new musical experience in its form; it is modern in its sound world
and it pays homage to one of classical music's most important
figures. It is a very fitting piece for the orchestra's centenary.
San Francisco Symphony have also recorded
this piece.
This orchestra is to my mind heard
at its best in minimalist works. It has a glistening, shimmery sound
which is uplifting to the listener, hopeful and expansive. Whilst the
Adams commission brought this out more than any other work on the
programme, it was also brought to the fore in the expansive later
sections of the second movement in Tchaikovsky's Fifth, which was
performed to close the second Edinburgh concert.
The Adams commission was given context by the performance also of
Beethoven's own work: here in Edinburgh, his fourth Piano Concerto in
which Philadelphia-educated Yuja Wang was the flamboyant soloist; in
the two-centre UK tour taken as a whole, the Eroica symphony too
(Proms, Mon 31st August). Ms Wang was very popular with
the Edinburgh audience, the Usher Hall was filled to capacity and she
received rapturous applause. Her musicianship was further displayed
in an excellent Queens
Hall recital earlier in the week with Greek violinist Leonidas
Kavakos. She joins the San Francisco Symphony again in London on
August 31st, this time to play Bartok's Second Piano Concerto.
Perhaps the highlight of the entire visit, though, was the performance
of Mahler Symphony no 1 – of which Michael Tilson Thomas is a noted interpreter – forming the second half of the first
Edinburgh concert. It is to be repeated this evening (Sun 30th
August) at the Proms, and is very well worth making the trip to
hear. If you can't do that, it's broadcast live on Radio Three.
The London performance will also include Boston-based pianist Jeremy
Denk playing more of what he has described as 'bad boy pianism', the
idiosyncratic Henry Cowell concerto.
No
American programme would be complete without Ives, and his
‘Decoration
Day’
from 'New
England Holidays' opened
the second evening. The first of the two concerts was opened by a
particularly enjoyable account of Schoenberg's
Theme and Variations (Op
43b) – possibly the
best live performance I've ever heard of this particular piece.
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