Yesterday afternoon's Spring Concert by Symphony Parnassus at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music featured the efforts of two highly promising eighteen-year-olds, the composer Preben Antonsen and the violinist Hannah Tarley. Antonsen has attracted considerable attention, having won the ASCAP Morton Gould Student Composer Award, the BMI Student Composer Award, and the Music Teachers Association of California Student Composition Award. Tarley first came to my attention when she was concertmaster for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO), an appointment she received at the age of twelve, making her the youngest concertmaster in SFSYO history.
The program began with Antonsen's "Thresh of Gear," which received its world premiere by the SFSYO a little over a year ago. The title comes from Seamus Heaney's verse translation of Beowulf in the passage depicting the arrival of the Geats at the Danish coast:
It was the end of their voyage and the Geats vaulted
over the side, out on to the sand,
and moored their ship. There was a clash of mail
and a thresh of gear.
This incidental episode became the basis for an energetic and richly orchestrated depiction of this disembarkation of Beowulf and his crew before their first encounter with Hrothgar.
Antonsen has brought a distinctively unique voice to this musical illustration, but one can detect influences that can orient the ear for which this is new territory. The way in which the music drives forward, almost relentlessly and with little regard for catching its breath, brings to mind the "Danse Sacrale" that concludes Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, although this is an evocation of the arrival of heroes, rather than a sacrificial death. I also realized that my ears had been prepared for the orchestral diversity by George Benjamin's Dance Figures, performed by the San Francisco Symphony in January with David Robertson conducting. (This memory was further tweaked on Friday night when, thanks to the good graces of XM Satellite Radio, I heard the broadcast of Robertson conducting this same work with the New York Philharmonic.)
Beyond establishing bearings in the space of listening experiences, however, I was also fascinated with the prospect of translating Beowulf into the medium of a tone poem. There have been a wide variety of dramatizations in different genres, including opera, and a few concert settings of the text, most notably Howard Hanson's "Lament for Beowulf," which used the translation by William Morris and A. J. Wyatt. However, Antonsen's conception seems to be as much an attempt to capture the spirit of the bardic tradition as a representation of an episode from an epic narrative.
We encounter that spirit from the very first word of the text, the Anglo-Saxon expletive "Hwæt." Heaney translates this as "So," almost as if the listener/reader is dropped into the bard's world in media res. I am more inclined to read that syllable as a clearing of the throat, a coarser version of the more polite "Ahem," which tries to bring attention to the teller of the tale. Antonsen conceived a intriguing (and attention-summoning) "Hwæt" to begin his composition, the single C-sharp pitch played in unisons and octaves across all of the instruments in a series of staggered entrances. It is as if the attention has been first summoned and then focused (through a crescendo) to prepare for a detailed account of a cluttered and noisy arrival, which the original bard(s) dispatched in a few lines of text. "Thresh of Gear" is as much a new experience of literature as it is of music. Whether or not conductor Stephen Paulson was aware of this literary connection, he had prepared Symphony Parnassus to account for the music to the full extent of its richness. His focus was on the accuracy of the reading, and his success could be established through the ability of the music to speak for itself and for the literature it embodied.
Antonsen's composition was followed by Tarley performing the solo part in Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 61 violin concerto in D major. We were now on much more familiar territory, but the experience was far from a routine exercise of memory. Tarley brought both freshness and energy to the logic behind the shaping of her phrases; and her chemistry with Paulson made for one of those edge-of-your-seat encounters in which it felt as if every member of the orchestra was integrally involved in the resulting experience. This was a performance in which one could appreciate the significance of every line of the instrumentation and the extent to which each of those lines has its own way of engaging with the solo instrument. The result was clearly a product of considerable thought from both conductor and soloist; and through it we can appreciate how, when performance is involved, even the most familiar compositions always deserve more than routine attention.
Paulson clearly had similar ideas for his performance of Beethoven's seventh symphony, Opus 92 in A major, after the intermission. Unfortunately, things got off to a somewhat scrappy start; and this may simply have been a consequence of there being only so much time to prepare a full concert program. However, whatever the limitations had been, Paulson had his priorities; and it was clear that the final movement was one of them. The "brio" of his Allegro con brio was energetic to a degree of ecstasy. If there had been some false steps on the path to that final movement, its arrival was still a cause for celebration, which dominated the experience of the entire symphony and brought a highly stimulating afternoon to a rousing conclusion.
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