Conductor Jahja Ling wisely sidestepped a similar contretemps by refraining from fucking the audience's collective ass during the San Diego Symphony's Jacobs' Masterworks Series on February 10th. Instead we were treated to sensitive performances of two very different symphonic 'masterworks' and an arresting West Coast premiere from a contemporary composer.
It's pronounced Eye-gorI had come for what would be the last performance of the day; Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, that mystic reverie of quivering strings and dancing rhythms which established the young Igor as a Big Fucking Deal. Originally composed for Diaghilev's Russian Ballet in 1909, it exists in numerous versions, of which Ling and Co. chose the widely played 1919 version that omits some of the more stage-bound music and adds two of the most memorable elements of the piece: the gentle Berceuse and the glorious Finale, a stately procession of singing horns that seems to spawn infinitely into the air before collapsing under its own weight. The Firebird builds surely to that grand end and boasts a rich, lustrous atmosphere that permeates every note, but it's rarely lackadaisical; the great clanging rhythms presage the violence of The Rite of Spring and its inventive percussion and crying horns are rapturously dramatic.
The Firebird Suite was preceded by the West Coast premiere of a new work by a young composer named Lowell Liebermann (born 1961). Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 95, was a brilliant and far-flung composition which began by embracing intense chromatic piano work - with deep bass runs that would make Cecil Taylor smile (or shit) - with inventive contrapuntal writing for the orchestra. It evolved into a haunting slow movement that at times sounded like a distant toy piano echoing through a thick fog. The pianist, the brilliant Jeffrey Biegel, describes this section as consisting of an "F-sharp Major harmony with gentle starlights" and furthermore deems it reminiscent of Brahms in its piano voicing. It certainly sounded lovely so I'll take his word for it.
The third movement of Liebermann's concerto was an insane Ives-ian carnival of pop distortions, the orchestra cycling through dramatic shifts into swing jazz, ragtime and showtunes like a feverish Woody Herman leading his Herd through a desperate audition for the WPA. It was marvelously exciting and a complete surprise given what had come before it but, as with the rest of the concerto, it managed to be both dauntingly rigorous and joyously footloose. It also received something of a mixed reception, the majority of the audience giving a long standing ovation while some of the older patrons wore an expression similar to that of a child watching his teddy bear being raped by the family dog. Doll rapist or no, Liebermann is an original and thrilling voice and I'm looking forward to catching up on his work.
The program began with Haydn's Symphony No. 94 in G major, also known as "The Surprise" for the ***SPOILER ALERT*** single loud chord that comes crashing unexpectedly into the otherwise quiescent second movement. Haydn, whom I mostly know as the inventor of the string quartet, was evidently something of a musical prankster who inserted Zappa-like meta-commentary into his pieces. According to the pre-concert lecture by Nuvi Mehta (Zubin's supercilious young cousin) one of his more extreme pranks was a composition which called for the players to leave the stage before resolving the performance. In this particular symphony the humor - with the exception of that single unsettling chord - is more subtle and mostly involves little rhythmic sleights of hand that subvert the listener's expectations. Mostly though, the Symphony was your typically graceful and effortless Classical confection; much like the prettiest girl in school its very perfection became a sort of narcotic blandness capable of lulling the hardiest of men into a dumb stupor.
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