It took almost twenty years for the San Francisco Symphony to get around to performing György Ligeti’s violin concerto. Ligeti had originally conceived the work as a three-movement composition, which he completed in 1990. However, in 1992 he revised it into the five-movement form, which is being given its first set of San Francisco Symphony performances during this week’s subscription concert. Last night was the first such concert in Davies Symphony Hall.
The concerto was written for Saschko Gawriloff, Concertmaster of the Cologne Radio Symphony, who had performed the premiere of Ligeti’s horn trio in 1982. The composition is extremely demanding on the soloist; so our wait can be attributed, at least in part, to finding a soloist ambitious enough to add the work to his/her repertoire. Last night’s soloist was Christian Tetzlaff, a familiar face in both Davies and Herbst Theatre (the latter for his many chamber music recitals there); and his ambition was definitely made of the stern stuff required to bring all the elements of his part under control. Where Ligeti is concerned, this is not just a matter of melodic line, dynamics, and rhythmic phrasing (although the dynamics are so extreme that the opening gesture has to sound as if it is gradually emerging from total silence). Ligeti has always had a keen ear for the subtleties of sonority; and this concerto requires micro-management of a wide diversity of spectral qualities that characterize the themes as much as their melodic content does.
Furthermore, this being a Ligeti score, the accompanying ensemble has to contend with almost as many demands as those confronting the soloist. Most important is that this ensemble is a chamber orchestra in which every line is a solo. In addition one violin and one viola are tuned a quarter tone off from the rest of the instruments. Then you have each member of the wind section doubling on ocarina (each performer playing an instrument of a different size), a folk instrument with its own eerie qualities of intonation, particularly when four of them play as a quartet. Finally, as final seasoning for this stew of microtonality, each of the two percussionists has to handle a slide whistle along with the usual elements of the battery.
Were it not for the percussion, one might think that Ligeti had decided to revisit his thirteen-instrument chamber concerto (completed in 1970) with more extended resources. However, the battery contributes to the melodic, as well as rhythmic, sonorities; and this is almost immediately apparent as that violin solo emerges out of silence. As they become audible, its shimmering arpeggios (picked up by the other string players) become interrupted by sharply accented “intruding” notes, each of which is enhanced, first by marimba and later by vibraphone. Through such techniques the entire concerto reveals itself more as a panorama of sonorities than as a discourse of traditional forms (although, from a structural point of view, this concerto is far more traditional than even the most sympathetic ear might gather).
Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) seemed right at home with the “chamber spirit” of this composition, always keeping each specific voice in his band at just the right level of integration with the solo line. For his part Tetzlaff glided his way through all the demands imposed on his part with the same inner calm we might encounter in his performance of Johannes Brahms. If there was any down-side to this execution of the concerto, it was that those of us on audience side got to listen to it only once. This is music that clearly has much to reveal over the course of several listening experiences, but it is also music of a complexity that is still beyond the capability of even the best recording equipment. One might get some sense of basic shape from a recording; but, for the most part, any recording can provide little more than the audio equivalent of a view from afar. We can only hope that the success of this occasion will lead to further opportunities to enjoy this inspired Ligeti composition in the near future.
MTT chose to couple his concerto with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 13 symphony in G minor (“Winter Daydreams”). This may seem like an odd pairing; but last night’s performance made it clear that, working with the resources he had to hand, Tchaikovsky had as much sensitivity to sonority as Ligeti had. The work was initially completed in 1866 but then revised towards the end of 1874. The symphony thus predates some of the earliest works for the stage that remain in repertoire, particularly the score for Swan Lake, which was completed in 1876. It should therefore be no surprise that we encounter much of what would become Tchaikovsky’s “ballet rhetoric” in this symphony, even to the point that the Adagio cantabile ma non tanto could be taken as music for a highly prolonged pas de deux.
Nevertheless, for the most part this is a well-formed abstract composition with a generous share of structural intricacy in each of its four movements. Compared with Tchaikovsky’s last three symphonies, this is a refreshing change from those tendencies for hyper-dramatic gesture so frequently associated with him. Thus, MTT found just the right level of expressiveness to make for a convincing execution of music so well turned-out in its own virtues that it never has to resort to extremes.
Any recourse to such extremes was dispensed with at the beginning of the program with Franz Liszt’s tone poem (he actually called it a “symphonic poem”) “Prometheus.” This seems to have originated from a musical setting of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s recasting of the classic Greek “Prometheus bound” legend as a vehicle for German romanticism. Liszt’s original score for Herder’s play was orchestrated by Joachim Raff; but the later symphonic poem was his own effort (clearly with knowledge of what Raff had done, however). The music is less concerned with any narrative about Prometheus and more with the character trait of his defiance. Liszt is certainly good at making a full orchestra froth defiantly; but, at the end of the day, he was far better a making a keyboard sound orchestral than he was in achieving the same effect with an actual orchestra. Placed alongside the nineteenth-century efforts of Tchaikovsky and the twentieth-century efforts of Ligeti, Liszt’s sense of orchestra sonorities is often weak; and his handling of the brass can verge on downright clumsy. Nevertheless, this was MTT’s selection as a “warm-up” overture; and our listening skills were definitely flexed into shape in time to appreciate much (if not all) of what Ligeti’s concerto had to offer.
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