SF EXAMINER
March 11, 2011

Kurt Masur explores the sonorities of Mendelssohn at Davies

Stephen Smoliar

There is an air of comfortable predictability to the music of Felix Mendelssohn that tends to serve as its greatest asset and its greatest liability. However, in preparing an all-Mendelssohn program for this week's San Francisco Symphony concerts at Davies Symphony Hall, visiting conductor Kurt Masur pursued an innovative strategy for freshening up the predictably familiar. Rather than focusing on the "note-based" grammatical ingredients, he chose to explore the sonorities of those notes, throwing new lights on Mendelssohn's approaches to instrumentation.

These metaphorical lights were realized by some novel approaches to the layout of the orchestra. The "quartet" portion of the string section assumed the usual fan structure, with the first violins on the left, followed by second violins, violas, and cellos, as one proceeded clockwise to the right. However, the winds were laid out in a single arced row behind the fan of strings, beginning with the flutes in the center and also proceeding clockwise through oboes and clarinets to the bassoons at approximately the two-o'-clock position. Behind the winds sat a shorter arc of brass (horns and trumpets), behind which were situated the basses. At the right edge of the stage, behind all other musicians, sat Jack Van Geem behind a pair of period timpani.

When Masur began the evening with the Opus 90 A major symphony ("Italian"), the initial impression was one of the comfortably routine, executed with a noticeably lighter touch then that of the more athletic "bicycle music" approach, through which the soundtrack of Breaking Away threatened to turn the score of the first movement into cliché. However, when the winds picked up the opening theme, their spatial orientation made their contribution noticeably different. One was more aware of the interplay between these solo voices and the string ensemble than when one encounters the more compact traditional layout. The resulting listening experience was one of an orchestra with aspirations for chamber music, perhaps complementing the Opus 20 string octet's "orchestral" aspirations. In other words Masur teased out a level of intimacy that one rarely associates with a symphony as full-throated as this one.

That intimacy was critical to the execution of the complete score for Opus 61, the incidental music for William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. After all, the operative adjective is "incidental." The music is there to provide context for the text, rather than dominate it; and there are episodes where fragments of music interact with the text. Thus, the basic approach to layout in Opus 90 was maintained and expanded to accommodate the additional resources. The vocal soloists, soprano Susannah Biller and mezzo Maya Lahyani, sat among the members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, all of whom formed their own arc behind the first and second violins. Jeffrey Anderson's tuba (substituting for the ophicleide in the original score) was now at the edge of the stage on the right, with timpani and two percussionists more removed from that edge.

Of course the play was not performed in its entirety. Rather, microphone-enhanced narrator Itay Tiran stood at a music stand behind the ensemble in the center of the stage, providing those texts appropriate to the musical selections ("in different voices," as T. S. Eliot once put it). This did not make for a particularly faithful account of the full narrative of the play, but it is reasonable to assume that most of the audience already knew the full story. Tiran was there to remind us of the appropriate scenes, rather than act them out for us; and he did this in a way that enhanced the music flow, even when it was at its most fragmented.

This entire conception thus established that same level of intimacy that Masur had evoked for the Opus 90 symphony. The result was still comforting. The music was as familiar as it has always been, but it was given a rhetorical turn that was anything but predictable. Listening to the music revealed new relationships that may previously have gone unnoticed. To invoke Eliot again, we found ourselves arriving "where we started," only to "know the place for the first time."

(Five out of five stars)