SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE
January 16, 2007

Showbiz and Style

Heuwell Tircuit

Conductor Kurt Masur has mellowed like a fine wine since his 1980 San Francisco Symphony debut. At 78 years old, he chose a program of 19th century staples for the Davies Symphony Hall audience last week, with a soloist he has championed, violinist Sarah Chang. In the process, he showed how gratifying such programming can be in the hands of a master.

He opened with Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 56, the "Scottish." Following intermission, he and Chang performed Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26, before Masur brought out the full orchestra for Richard Strauss' boisterous tone poem, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Op. 28.

By and large, it was Masur's evening. The amount of detail and sense of proportion he brought to Mendelssohn's largest purely orchestral symphony was a delight. It's clearly a work he knows from the inside out, and he avoided the usual pitfalls — the most common of which is sentimentality.

The first movement's introduction moved along without stopping to sniff the heather. It is marked Andante, to be sure, but that's modified by con moto ("with motion"). Another danger point, all too often exaggerated, is the coda of the work, Allegro guerriero ("martial allegro"). The marking of the finale softens into a final Maestoso ("grandly"), but that last indication does not signify that the tempo ought to be much slower. When the momentum is lost, the entire movement can turn into pablum.

The Gewandhaus connection

Masur avoided such naivete by again keeping the music moving along with dignity, free of sanctimony or swooning. All that is perfectly apt, since it is known that Mendelssohn the conductor favored brisk tempos during his days with the Leipzig Gewandhaus — the same orchestra Masur headed from 1970 to 1996. There is, after all, something to be said for the musicality of a historically continuous tradition.

The same deftness was applied to the dynamics, as Masur balanced the necessary soft-touch tenderness and elegance against the occasional violent outbreaks. The slow movement was as fine a rendering as I've encountered over the years. By contrast, the scherzo chirped and twittered along, the Symphony's virtuoso woodwinds easily coping with all the fast quadruple tonguing with nary a wrinkle to the sonic sheeting. The end result was a "Scottish" with the fine points and musicality in perfect order and free from even hints of smogginess — a thing not always true of Masur performances 25 years ago.

Those virtues were also evident in Strauss' tone poem, which brimmed with wit and sheer gusto. Again, all kinds of little textures emerged from the masses of sound that you rarely hear highlighted so subtly. I had the feeling that everyone on stage was having a whale of a good time. The uncommonly large instrumentation — twice the normal number of trumpets (six) and horns (eight instead of four) — produced a sensational balance. All, however, was not perfect in terms of intonation during the Thursday evening performance. While never grievous, there were a few dicey passages in the strings.