"What's wrong with being a museum?" Metropolitan Opera general manager
Joseph Volpe confronted the interviewer from the Financial Times this
weekend.  "It seems to me people go to museums.  Why?  To see art that
is 100, 200, 300 years old.  I love being accused of being a museum, as
long as we do it extraordinarily well."

San Francisco had its own musical museum experience tonight, in Davies
Hall, where Daniel Barenboim conducted the Berlin Staatskapelle in an
all-Schumann program.

Here's an orchestra that's 30 years older in its present incarnation
than the Declaration of Independence or may be dated back to its very
beginning in 1570, on a US tour, playing exclusively standard works
(overplayed and over-recorded, however lovely), written more than a
century and a half ago.

That certainly sounds like museum-y, but just as Volpe points out, people
do go to museums (if the names are big enough) - the 2,800-seat hall was
very close to a sellout.

Of course, Volpe is clouding the issue by equating "museum" with "art
that is 100, 200, 300 years old." Age is not the point, nor is the
environment.  You can encounter an ancient painting in a claustrophobic
room, and it can reach out and hit you over the head.  There is nothing
staid or even stately about a personal experience with a Bosch or a
Breughel, even after a half a millennium.

But tonight, a great deal of applause to the contrary (including between
movements, something that did not happen when the Berlin Philharmonic
played here last month), I found the Staatskapelle performance mostly
similar to its tried-and-true-but-not-extraordinary work on most nights
in the pit of the Berlin Staatsoper.

It's a fine, competent orchestra, under the baton of a similarly qualified
conductor (whose performances as a pianist almost always outshine his
conducting), performing great works of the Romantic literature (Schumann's
Second and Third symphonies) in a smooth, impressive manner.  Extraordinary?
Not really.

Performances tonight were not quite as flawless as on the new
Barenboim-Staatskapelle Schumann cycle CD set just released, but more
lively and "human." Tempos ran away at times (particularly at the end
of the first movement of No.  2); the Scherzo of No.  3 sounded more
Tchaikovsky than Schumann; at times the balance between first and second
violin sections was tenuous; and the brass was not always reliable.  And
yet, there was more life and liveliness to it than what you hear in the
curiously bland Deutsche Grammophon recording.

But that's not the point.

"Extraordinary" moments are those when you no longer keep score or "good"
and "bad," when you don't marvel at the virtually uniform use of shiny
patent-leather shoes, appreciate the increasing number of young and
female musicians in the orchestra.  In fact, the Click happens when you
no longer listen, watch, observe at all, but become part of the performance,
when you go inside the music.

And that happened only twice during the evening - a fraction of the time
peak experience offers itself when Simon Rattle is in the hall with that
other Berlin orchestra, when the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester plays
Wagner or Bartok, whole movements of MTT's Mahler with the "local
orchestra" here, etc.

The main theme in the Adagio of the Second Symphony provided such an
enchanting moment, the sweep of the opening of the third movement of No.
3 took one's breath away - but otherwise, it was simply a "good evening."
Nothing to be sneezed at, of course, but one wonders if the visitors
offered more variety, perhaps the evening might have turned out to be
even better.

The alternative to an all-Schumann program (of which Chicago is about
to get FOUR evenings!) is not necessarily something "new and shocking."
The same evening, in New York, another German "institution" - Kurt Masur
- led the Philharmonic in another century-old program, but how interesting,
unusual and promising it must have been, with Szymanowski's First Violin
Concerto and Max Reger's "Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart,"
in addition to Haydn's Symphony No.  88.  Now there is a museum experience
in the sense of a repository of something old, something rare, something
you're not likely to find in the discount bin of the corner Tower Records.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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