This year, I'm listening to recordings of the music I'm hearing live before the actual performance. This was the first concert that I've tried with this new regime, and the results were quite interesting. The first piece, Street Song for Symphonic Brass, by Michael Tilson Thomas, is for four French horns, three trumpets and flugelhorn, two trombones, bass trombone, and tuba. It's a re-work of a brass quintet by the same name. There is no recording of the symphonic brass version, but I did find a recording of the quintet by the Center City Brass Quintet. Street Song is lovely, beautifully showcasing the range of colors and moods that brass can evoke, and the performance on the CD is terrific. The ensemble is wonderfully fleet and tight, and the group's "turn-on-a-dime" dynamic, tone color and mood shifts are just delightful. I listened to the piece three or four times, growing fonder with each run-through.
The SFO performance, alas, was disappointing. Attacks were tentative, tempos a bit slow, the ensemble in many spots wasn't crisp, and it seemed low energy. No clams - a major accomplishment in this obviously difficult piece - but there was a carefulness to the playing that interfered with forward momentum and overall energy. It is nearly impossible to get to quintet tightness with a conducted ensemble, but I've been listening to this group long enough (almost 15 years now) to know it could have been a lot better. It could be lack of rehearsal and not enough time for the piece to settle in, or, it could have just been an off night. Street Song is on their West Coast tour, so they get a few more shots at it. Now I have to go back and listen to the recording again to make sure I still like it as much as I think I do!
The Prokofiev Piano Concerto Number 5 was the opposite experience. I didn't like the recording I got at all, and was not looking forward to the performance - but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. This is wacky music. The structure is bizarre - four scherzo-type things surrounding a lyrical larghetto movement. The opening sounded like the pianist and orchestra frantically searching for tunes they could both agree on - and that impression never let up. Garrick Ohlsson and the orchestra gave a wonderful account - beautifully precise, lots of deadpan humor (my concert companion was stifling giggles through the whole thing) - and made a good case for the piece's demented (but eventually evident) internal logic. Now I want to listen to the recording again to see if I like it any better.
I love the way MTT and San Francisco Symphony play Tchaikovsky. Their rendition of the Symphony #5 was totally satisfying. Robert Ward played the second movement horn solo with plangent eloquence. Before the concert, I'd listened to a version recorded around 1970, by the USSR Symphony, conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov. Reasonable recording, very nice playing, but the SFO version was a lot better - sweeter and more fluid, with equivalent passion. MTT's moment-to-moment focus provided visual cues as to what to focus on in the music, which always leads to a deeper experience.
The evening was capped off with an "Off the Podium" session with Tilson Thomas and Ohlsson. They appeared about 20 minutes after the concert, sans tuxes (MTT looking especially suave in color-coordinated blue-gray sports jacket and running shoes), to field questions from the audience. Some highlights - Garrick Ohlsson pre-answered a question he always gets asked "How do you memorize all those note?" He claimed memorizing the notes is the easy part, it's playing them correctly that's hard! MTT was asked how he decides whether to use a score or not during a performance (he'd conducted the Tchaikovsky without one). He said it depended on a on how sharp he was feeling at the time and and how close he was to knowing a piece "by heart". The Tchaikovsky is a "heart" piece for him. He likened his experience with it to "revisiting a national park", which I thought was a wonderful analogy. My favorite question was from a woman near the back - she asked MTT how he keeps the orchestra together. "Do you gesture before, and then they come in or what? I couldn't tell from where I was sitting". He answered that determining when "now" is - and also what kind of "now" is happening - is a conductor's main job. This may not have answered the woman's question (it sounded like she was more interested in the mechanics of it) but I loved the answer.
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