Following the tradition honored by the San Francisco Symphony last week in the first concert of their subscription season, the Conservatory Orchestra of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, under the baton of Andrew Mogrelia, began their series of five programs for the 2011–2012 season with the familiar overture-concerto-symphony form. Furthermore, as was the case last week, the least conventional (and definitely most striking) work on the program was the concerto. This was Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto, performed by Douglas Kwan, a Conservatory undergraduate student in his senior year. This concerto was flanked by the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s opera L’italiana in Algeri and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 21 symphony in C major (the first).
Bartók’s concerto is outstanding even within his own portfolio. It is one of his longest symphonic works, on the same durational scale as his “Concerto for Orchestra.” More striking, however, is that its first movement is probably the longest single movement he ever conceived. It is structurally sophisticated in its approach to weaving together several themes, most of which have folk sources, and then elaborating on those themes with highly demanding virtuoso writing for the soloist and a dazzling exploration of a rich palette of full orchestral sonorities. At the end of this movement the listener cannot help but feel a sense of accomplishment at the completion of an ambitious journey, yet the two movements that follow are anything but anticlimax.
Any student who dares to take on this concerto must have ambition made of the sternest stuff, and Kwon was definitely such a student. He invested his whole body in the execution of each of Bartók’s demanding passages yet always conveyed a confident sense of the concerto as a whole and his role of engagement with the orchestra. Mogrelia, for his part, was always there with Kwon, pacing the flow to support both the expressiveness of the melodic passages and the intricacies of the virtuoso embellishments, all the while maintaining a sure balance among the vast diversity of Bartók’s instrumental voices.
Presumably last night’s performance of this concerto was the result of some intense and highly committed effort on the part of both soloist and ensemble. It is therefore important to note that the ensemble was just as committed to the rest of the program. The Rossini overture clicked along with all of that uncanny precision for which the composer is so well known. The same can be said of his reputation for the extended crescendo, which Mogrelia handled so masterfully that it was as much a thing of beauty as a technical feat. I was particularly struck by the way in which all of the violins began their pianissimo bowing close to the bridge and gradually moved the bow down to where the string had more room to vibrate. The result was a crescendo based as much on the emergence of a richer blend of upper harmonics as on increased amplitude. It is technical details like these that escalate Rossini from routine entertainment to an absorbing listening experience.
The Beethoven symphony received a robust account with relatively strong orchestral resources (at least in comparison with those inclined to a more “historically informed” approach). Intricacy was as significant here as it had been in the Rossini overture, even if the structural logic involved a more extended repertoire of themes and approaches to development. If Rossini’s rhetoric relied on the impact of that extended crescendo, Mogrelia’s rhetorical stance towards Beethoven involved subtle shaping of dynamic levels on a note-by-note basis, allowing each phrase to breathe with its own organic (Heinrich Schenker’s favorite adjective) qualities. This approach also provided just the right platform to display Beethoven’s sense of wit, exercised throughout the symphony but most prominent in the Adagio that begins the final movement with its hesitant series of steps up the C major scale.
For those who had not read the news elsewhere, the program reminded us that this is Mogrelia’s final season as Music Director of the Conservatory Orchestra, and he certainly seems committed to making it a memorable one.
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