"To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee,
/ And revery.  / The revery alone will do, / If bees are few."

It's a smart move for any composer to use Emily Dickinson's poems.
Regardless of the quality of the music, most of the audience will be
grateful for the reminder, for the opportunity to read again these quirky,
often puzzling, charming-wounded-nonlinear miniatures with the consistent
"Close Encounters" theme that "it means something!"

Michael Tilson Thomas knows how to pick collaborators.  His "Poems of
Emily Dickinson" - a 23-minute work consisting of seven poems - had its
world premiere tonight in Davies Hall, with Renee Fleming as soloist, the
composer conducting the San Francisco Symphony, the orchestra he is heading
for the seventh year.

And yet, even before the performance, there was something strange about
this business.  A 70-piece orchestra? For Dickinson?

That question of scale and appropriateness remained even after hearing -
and appreciating - a lively, pleasant, sound-track-plus work.  MTT knows
music theater, orchestral balance and the primacy of words as well as
anyone, so he used few instruments at any one time and "held down" the
orchestra, so there was never any masking of the voice.  But that, in turn,
brings up the question again - why a big orchestra if you're too smart to
use it to crush these brilliant miniatures?

While balances were excellent, the vocal writing frequently wasn't and the
text failed to come through even while the voice did.  I caught about three
words in the minute-long "Down Time's Quaint Stream" - even while looking
at the text.

In the longest piece, at almost 6 minutes, the clover-and-bee "Nature
Studies," the text became unintelligible again through most of the middle
section of the poem.  The music for this song, however, is one of the
highlights of the cycle, with a remarkably spooky orchestral fugue just
before the conclusion.

Against the lighthearted nature of the music in "Nature Studies," "The
Bible" and "Fame" (is there a "West Side Story" music reference there?),
MTT wrote something between a hymn and a dirge for "Of God We Ask One
Favor."

"The Earth Has Many Keys" passes by without making a lasting impression,
but "Take All Away from Me," with its seriously catchy Broadway sound,
stays with the listener - and also poses a puzzle.  The song repeats the
phrase "Take All Away" at the beginning and at the end, neglecting the
end of the sentence, "but leave me Ecstasy." Surely, Dickinson's point was
that all else is unimportant against one's bliss, and yet the composer's
emphasis is on the sorrow of all else being taken away.  It doesn't
compute.

Fleming was in fine voice and while obviously saving it for the
program-concluding Strauss "Four Last Songs," she made the most of the
many theatrical opportunities of the cycle.

The orchestra shone in both "Four Last Songs" and "Till Eulenspiegel's
Merry Pranks," but opened the evening with a performance of Tchaikovsky's
"Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture" as if paying homage to the St.
Petersburg Philharmonic's visit to Davies Sunday and Monday night.

The sound was an exact match of the visiting Russians' overblown,
bombastic virtuosity in Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff concerti, although Yuri
Temirkanov' s Tchaikovsky (the Fourth Symphony) was far more restrained and
straightforward than Michael Thomashefsky's tonight, in a rare case of
getting carried away.  Emily would not have approved.

Janos Gereben/SF
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