Emanuel Ax (left), one of San Francisco’s favorite pianists, returns to Davies Symphony Hall this coming week to perform with the San Francisco Symphony, on October 9, 10, and 11. These evenings promise some memorable music making.
With Peter Oundjian conducting, the program consists of Mozart’s overture to The Magic Flute, the Richard Strauss Burleske for piano and orchestra, Szymanowski’s Sinfonia concertante — essentially his fourth symphony — for piano and orchestra, and then to conclude the evening, Tchaikovsky’s tone poem Francesca da Rimini.
The Strauss Burleske is an early work which takes deadly (delightful) aim at both Brahms and Wagner, the heads of two respective camps fighting a raging battle during the later nineteenth century, over the time-honored issues of modernism (Wagner) versus tradition (Brahms).
Well, at least the battle seemed raging to its participants; to most folks it was just a lot of hot air spewed forth by hysterical commentators and folks with nothing better to do with their lives.
The Burleske burlesques both of the Brahms piano concertos (the first of which, we should remember, was a dismal failure at its premiere), and evens the score by skewering Wagner’s Die Walküre, opera no. 2 of the titanic Ring cycle.
The parody was heightened by Strauss having written the work for the pianist Hans von Bülow, one of the very few musicians of the era to ally himself with both warring factions — he conducted the premiere of Tristan und Isolde (Wagner) and was the rehearsal conductor for the Brahms Fourth Symphony. Thus von Bülow was being given a delectable chance to have some fun at both camps’ expense.
Alas, the sarcastic, waspish pianist (surely one of the most unpleasant little twits in music history) condemned the work as unplayable, and therefore the relatively uncontroversial pianist Eugene d’Albert premiered the piece in 1886.
Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini sets the story of the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, from Part I (Inferno) of Dante’s Divine Comedy, as they pay the traditional price for extra-marital whoopee, i.e. being flambée’d, roasted, and fricaseed for eternity. The abiding interest here is in the depiction of Hell; flames, demons, screaming, all that cool stuff. (The story has also been set as an opera by both Rachmaninoff and Zandonai; people certainly do take a prurient pleasure in such distressing material.)
Karol Szymanowski (right), 20th-century Polish composer, was one of those fascinating folk who could be found hanging around the Ballets Russes during the palmy days of Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, et al. Although he wrote with a certain amount of attention to Polish national idiom, he is best remembered as a composer of pronounced exoticism, setter of Hafiz and classical Aeolic verse, the creator of the astonishingly beautiful homoerotic opera King Roger.
The Sinfonia concertante comes from the later days of his career, blending his typically opulent eroticism with a near-Bartókian vigor.
Even though one could describe the overture to The Magic Flute as the musical hors d’oeuvre to kick off the evening, there is actually a rather interesting backstory to this well-known orchestral gem.
But to find out about that, you’ll need to attend the “Inside Music” pre-concert lecture, given at 7:00 PM on October 9 and 11th, by yours truly. I’ll be relating that intriguing little soupçon of a story about the Mozart, and then delving (with devilish relish) into musical depictions of Hell.
Tickets for the concerts — 8:00 PM on October 9 and 11, and 6:30 PM on the 10th — are available from the S.F. Symphony Box Office, either in person at Davies Symphony Hall, over the telephone (415-864-6000), or online. Pre-concert lectures are 7:00 PM on the 9th and 11th. As an added bonus, the gracious Emanuel Ax will be signing CDs in the lobby after the concert.
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