SAN FANCISCO CHRONICLE
April 8, 2005

Cellist dazzles in concerto written for her
Joshua Kosman

Wednesday's concert by the San Francisco Symphony under guest conductor Kurt Masur introduced not one but two imposing new figures to the local musical scene. One was Alfred Schnittke's First Cello Concerto, and the other was cellist Natalia Gutman, for whom the piece was written in 1986; together they made a dazzling joint debut in Davies Symphony all.

Schnittke, the Russian-German composer who died in 1998 at 63 just as his music was emerging from the Soviet deep-freeze to take its rightful place on the international stage, was the most dynamic of elegists. Especially in his last decades, his music was a constant memorial to an irreclaimable musical past, an imagined Eden in which composers from Bach to Strauss created their masterpieces without stress or philosophical contradiction.

Those days are gone, Schnittke's music suggests, leaving us no option but to comb through the rubble of the past and try to create mosaics from the shards. The combination of mournfulness and optimistic energy with which he tackled that task remains the most appealing aspect of Schnittke's artistry.

The First Cello Concerto, like the heartbreaking Violin Concerto No.4 of 1984 that Alexander Barantschik played with the Symphonytwo years ago, builds its argument from the tension between familiar and often luminously beautiful musical gestures and the cacophonous explosions that disrupt them.

The piece is expansive in scale, encompassing four movements played without pause and running about 40 minutes. But the rhetoric, with its steady stream of dark melody and anxious disruption, is almost painfully intimate.

The opening alone contains the composer's unmistakable fingerprints. The cello intones a sumptuous, lovely melody, like something Prokofiev might have entrusted to a slow movement (there is a lot of Prokofiev throughout the piece); only the subdued, blurred muttering of the orchestra hints menacingly at what is to come.

The catastrophe falls soon enough, though, in the form of a densely imploding orchestral chord that obliterates everything in its past. At that point, the soloist — sobered and perhaps a little shell-shocked — spends the rest of the concerto trying to recover some-thing of the musical thread.

The concerto's formal plan itself is telling, a traditional three-movement layout with a hauntingly plaintive slow movement appended at the end as an obvious after-thought. The slow second movement harks back to the instrumental aria that generally stands at the center of a three-movement concerto, and it's followed by a jaunty Prokofievian march that speeds up to become almost a jig.

The writing is compellingly allusive throughout (Wagner, Beethoven and Shostakovich all put in appearances). But corruption and decay lurk around every corner, as the musical texture either detonates or smears into nonsense like some face-melting special effect from a sci-fi movie. Only the finale, with its bittersweet blend of minor and major, offers a tentative glimmer of hope.

The piece is dedicated to Gutman, and her performance was nothing short of astounding. With her darkly voluptuous string tone and unerring precision of pitch and rhythm, she endowed the music with a heightened sense of drama.

Most remarkable was the mastery with which she infused Schnittke's predominantly gloomy landscape with shafts of light and even puckish wit. Masur and the orchestra brought superb intensity to the performance.

After intermission came Brahms' Second Symphony, in a reading that alternated between moments of fleet directness and overemphasis. There was a winning sense of purpose to the opening pages, and the third movement moved with light-footed grace; other sections, particularly those dominated by the brass, sounded blowsy.