FIRES, FORESTS AND CRINGE-WORTHY EXERCISES
The weekend’s S.F. Symphony programs were downbeat more than upbeat leaving little to cheer about except the robust SFS Chorus under Jenny Wong.
Well, maybe not that either. “Yes, they sang in Russian, but you couldn’t understand much of it,” a patron fluent in Russian divulged.
This was the masterful oratorio of a Russian celebration by Igor Stravinsky, “Les Noces” (the Wedding), telling his century-old tale in his staunch neoclassical way, with soprano Lauren Snouffer playing the lead role of the village bride. This 23-minute sharp-edged opus is too good a piece to waste without any program text or translation, and too good to further cheapen it with animated cartoons showing rats dancing and millipedes crawling around toilets (projections created by artist Hillary Leben). It was as outrageous as if someone had scrawled graffiti on a museum masterwork.
In a season of premieres, I hope this venture will be a derniere.
Despite the French title, this is a Russian work recalling the pre-emigration Stravinsky. It cried out for an English-language printing of the texts sung, but the 30-page program booklet left no space for this, nor for fully crediting scholar Piotr Kireyevsky for collecting these popular 19th-century Russian poems of many stripes.
But the real muddying of the waters and the nuptials came in the vulgar, tasteless animated millipedes projected for the Davies Hall audience, themes totally unrelated to Stravinsky or “Les Noces.” It was a cringe-worthy exercise in pseudo-humorous futility. Since the days of Diaghilev’s dancers, the work is often produced as a strictly musical enterprise, which I hope will be the thrust of future stabs at Igor’s opus when dancers are not in house.
This misfire overshadowed a recent work that deserved better, “Breathing Forests” (2021) by Gabriella Smith of Berkeley. She is a marvel at tone-painting—churning, chirping, murmuring, breathing, roaring. In her three-movement piece, she tosses in everything from the sonic spectrum: low-growling brass, barely recognizable piccolo, and dense, dense fortissimos depicting the destruction by fire.
Running nearly a half-hour, “Breathing Forests” could use, if not tree-cutting, at least abbreviating. In addition, despite James McVinnie at the pipe organ, at times even throwing his elbows into the fray, this was no organ concerto, but rather an obbligato.
The program opened with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the extra tidy, sharp-clipped, neoclassical Stravinsky Octet for Wind Instruments, now exactly 100 years old, attractively played by the SFS’ foursome of woodwinds with a foursome of brass.
SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY and Chorus, heard Nov. 17, Davies Hall, S.F. For info: (415) 864-6000, or go online www.sfsymphony.org.
