The Czech Philharmonic's appearance in Davies Hall tonight posed a puzzle.
It's a magnificent instrument - with solid strings, virtuoso woodwinds,
an incredible brass section - that was not played to its potential.

Under the baton of its music director, Vladimir Ashkenazy - a skilled
but not special conductor - the orchestra sounded smooth and sweet, but
something was missing: urgency, cohesion, true brilliance. A potentially
great orchestra playing "merely" well.

Coming on the day of the SF Symphony announcement of a lamentably bland
next season, the visitors from Prague showed that it's possible to tour
with a program other than Beethoven, Mozart and Schumann at the exclusion
of everything else.

The Philharmonic offered Prokofiev's intriguing, uneven Sixth Symphony,
a work very much worth hearing, especially once in a decade; Debussy's
"Jeux" and - for many brownie points - the Suite No. 2 from Roussel's
"Bacchus and Ariadne"... not "great music" by a long shot, but one of
those perpetual novelty items that liven up a concert any time.

I admired Ashkenazy as a pianist for three decades, but his conducting
career in the past 20 years or so has never made a similar impression.
Tonight's concert was a perfect demonstration of the problem. He got a
flawless performance from the Prague musicians, every note in place, but
a curious sense of blandness cast a pall over what should have been one
of those grand events in the concert hall. His musicians respond to him,
but they don't excel beyond a certain level, bumping into some kind of
glass ceiling on the way up.

I never had the pleasure of hearing the Czech Philharmonic live,
conducted by Charles Mackerras, but judging by many live concerts (of
other orchestras) lead by Sir Charles and by his recordings in Prague,
I am pretty sure that what I missed tonight from the Philharmonic was
the Mackerras touch or something similar - a quality missing from
Ashkenazy's perfectly decent leadership.

He was here with the Philharmonic three years ago, playing Dvorak, and
the over-all quality of the orchestra's performance got even better since
- all the more frustrating in not hitting those true high notes that are
the Czech Philharmonic's historical birthright.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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