#9: Sacred and profane
Leftovers
San Francisco Symphony sat back with some Russian music: Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, Gubaidulina’s Fairytale Poem, and Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1, with Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Then, a sensible Bruckner 4.
I cry at the drop of a hat — and at the plight of a piece of chalk, recounted in Gubaidulina’s program notes to Fairytale Poem. And yet not even an ideal performance (the SF Opera orchestra sounded fantastic under conductor Clément Mao-Takacs) could get me to feel anything for Sariaaho’s school shooting opera, Innocence. It was the same at the Symphony last year with Adriana Mater, an opera on wartime rape. Fortunately it takes three to make a pattern.
At Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade’s The Magic Flute, also at SFO, I said for the first time, “I love the projections.” They were by far the best part.
If only Tchaikovsky had written that Francesca opera — it’s such a cinematic story, I can hardly believe that she was a real person, someone’s aunt. In fact it was from her nephew that Dante, a houseguest, heard the tale. I don’t know Italian but working backwards from the side-by-side translation it feels as though I do.
With its plagal harmonies Tchaikovsky’s music here sounds less passionate than predestined. Still, though Francesca and Paulo are damned to only the second circle of Hell (just beyond the nonbelievers) the piece ends, dramatically, with nine chords.
Bruckner actually counted his blessings: in a neurotic notebook he recorded his every prayer. I count the minutes, in reviews — it feels necessary to mention when a symphony exceeds an hour — but none of his feel very long; I love them. The Fourth Symphony doesn’t reach for ewig: Bruckner speaks his piece, then the line goes dead. (I also love Mahler, and my aunt for staying through all of Das Lied von der Erde, whose ending she found repetitive to the point of parody).
At any rate, how amazing it is that with so few chords — so little at all, really — these composers managed to do so much.
Bruckner did miss out on one experience: love. He kept lists of girls who appealed to him but never got a woman to say yes. And did he have any friends?
Gubaidulina, who seems like a lovely person, writes, “I am a religious Russian Orthodox person and I understand ‘religion’ in the literal meaning of the word, as ‘re-ligio’, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the ‘legato’ of life. There is no more serious task for music than this.”
Wish List
Endorsements
I’m still swooning for Saint-Saëns, lately the gushy Violin Concerto No. 1
This seems like my only opportunity to bat for Bruckner’s string quartet, a composition exercise with a pretty Scherzo
Elgar’s Elegy, simple and simply gorgeous
Explorations
I didn’t know a lick of Hugo Alfvén, the Swedish Strauss, until last month — what a ballet Bergakungen is!
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