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Copland, Berg, Brahms, Thomas, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky: Garrick Ohlsson (piano), San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 20 & 21.1.2009 (BJ)

Copland: Music from the film Our Town
Berg: Three Pieces for Orchestra, op.6
Brahms: Symphony No. 1
Michael Tilson Thomas: Street Song
Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 5
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5


Back in the dear days, now happily dead and beyond recall, when English food was bad, Waverley Root remarked that the English didn’t cook as they did because they didn’t know how to do otherwise, but because they actually liked their food that way. The connection between that observation and two concerts by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra may seem Byzantine, but have patience: all shall be made clear in due time.

Michael Tilson Thomas (hereinafter referred to for brevity’s sake as MTT) is a conductor who has made enormously valuable contributions to music, and particularly contemporary music, in San Francisco and the world at large. He is capable of great things, sometimes in areas of repertoire that you might not expect to be his forte: a superb La Mer recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra comes most immediately to mind. But the performances he led on these two evenings fell distinctly short of greatness. 

MTT’s problem, I have sometimes felt, is that he thinks he is Leonard Bernstein. Certainly the spoken introduction to Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra that he offered the audience, with illustrations contributed by his players, was fluent and unpretentious in a manner not unworthy of his great predecessor, if not quite as witty or trenchant. On the other hand, I once heard him, in the course of a discussion that he was himself illustrating on the piano, continue his examples at the same rapid pace even when he came to a slow movement. This reminded me of Donald Tovey’s wise observation that, if you are watching a musician read a score, and he goes on turning the pages just as fast on reaching the slow movement, you may legitimately entertain some doubts about his musicality.

Bernstein was famous, or notorious might be a better word, for the extravagance of his podium deportment, and it was the matter of gesture that brought Waverley Root’s remark to my mind. Bernstein once said that he sympathized totally with people who couldn’t stand to watch him conduct because of all his jumping about and visibly emoting – indeed, he said he wouldn’t be able to watch himself himself, but he was sorry, that was the only way he could conduct. In other words, Bernstein’s vocabulary of gesture came from within: MTT’s, it looks to me, is imposed on the music from the outside. For much of these two evenings, his manner on the podium seemed mannered and self-advertising. In other words, while Bernstein couldn’t help the way he looked, MTT surely has a choice, and like those benighted Englishmen of old, he actually likes it that way. (Later in this two-day residency I finally worked out who it was that he reminded me of: if Mr. Bean were a conductor, this is exactly the way he would look.)

Now I know that what is important in judging a performance is what actually gets to be heard. But it is precisely the point that, like most actions, a conductor’s gestures have consequences. In the two inner movements of Brahms’s First Symphony, for which MTT laid his baton aside, all of his gestural repertoire said “pretty”; and as a result some certainly gracious but also profound music emerged sounding just that – not beautiful, or soul-stirring, or heart-easing, but merely pretty.

Nor was his interpretation of the outer movements at all impressive. In the main body of the finale, no account was taken of the various nuances and modifications of tempo marked in the score – an “animato” here, a “largamente” there. The whole thing went on at the same unvarying speed, only to be brought to a shuddering halt with the violent application of brakes for the return of the brass chorale in the coda. After the slowish introduction to the first movement, the Allegro didn’t “explode” in the way the adjectivally overloaded program note promised, but just began quite neatly and tidily. Perhaps, I thought, MTT was planning for a heightened impact the second time around, which would be a valid interpretative option – but then there was no second time around: astonishingly for a conductor who also presents himself as a composer, he cut the exposition repeat, thus making nonsense of the sudden pianissimo just after the start of the development, which has meaning only when you hear it as a sudden dramatic break with a regularity established by playing the exposition twice as the composer directed.

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth presents few pitfalls of this kind, and it received a performance that was decent enough. But I have to say that, in both of the symphonies that concluded their respective programs, the San Francisco Symphony did not cover itself with glory. There was some superb playing by the timpanist, David Herbert, and the second movement of the Tchaikovsky featured a serviceable horn solo, if not one on the level regularly achieved by Seattle’s own principal horn. For the rest, I had the impression that MTT doesn’t work on sound, as a conductor has to do, whether he is fulfilling a guest engagement or, as in his case, leading an orchestra in the fourteenth year of his music directorship. The string tone lacked focus, the heavy brass was tinny and insubstantial, and the woodwinds veered between some accomplished moments and others that were simply unpolished. Insufficiently careful balance, too, left many touches in both scores–some trumpet coloring in the trio section of the Brahms’s third movement, a couple of brass fanfares and an important woodwind line in the finale of the Tchaikovsky – that I heard only because I knew they were there.

Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra were done with suitably big-boned swagger, but, again, lacked nuance and refinement. Altogether the best performances in the two evenings were of Prokofiev’s sadly trivial Fifth Piano Concerto, where orchestra and conductor supported Garrick Ohlsson’s characteristically brilliant pianism punctually enough, and of the pieces that opened each program. The conductor allowed Copland’s pleasant Our Town score to make its impact at its own natural pace. And in the twelve-instrument second version of his own Street Song – a sequence of mostly beguiling harmonies, organized without much in the way of overarching logical progression – the brass section did its best and mellowest work of either evening.

Bernard Jacobson


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