Were it not for the San Francisco Opera Center, the San Francisco Symphony
tonight would have been up the creek without...  soloists.

Scheduled for the Faure Requiem, Barbara Bonney took ill, and former
Adler fellow Nicolle Foland stood in.  Then, before the concert, Gabriel
Souvanen, a Swedish baritone about to make his debut here, said that he
cannot go on, and once again, the call went out to the Opera, across the
street.  Brad Alexander, a super-talented young singer, also a Merola/Adler
veteran, to the rescue.

Unfortunately, replacements stopped there, and the concert went on with
the originally scheduled conductor.

I don't know if it's a coincidence, but wherever and whenever (in many
lands, through decades), I hear Vladimir Ashkenazy conduct, I rue the
day - long, long ago - when this exceptional pianist decided to start
waving the baton.

Perhaps if I am not in the audience, he justifies his long and apparently
successful career, but what I have always heard, and what came through
painfully tonight, is somebody adequate and mediocre, *playing* music,
not singing it, not riding its crest, giving it shape and meaning.

Such missing qualities were in great demand tonight, in an all-French
repertoire of mostly "pleasant music." Certainly, the first half of the
concert was soporific to the max, 45 minutes of unison, endless string
passages.  Simon Rattle might have enlivened the evening, but none of
his magic was in evidence.

"Psyche" is a mellow retread of whatever Cesar Franck left out of his
Symphony in D (and some restatements of what's in that work already),
led by Ashkenazy in a warm, heartfelt, slack-jawed fashion.  The last
movement ended well, with some sign of life at long last, but it was too
little, too late.  The Symphony's marvelous string sections worked hard,
but there was no shape or edge to what they were playing.

Honegger's 1941 Second Symphony has more content than "Pscyhe," but you'd
never know that in the interpretation heard tonight in Davies Hall.
Instead of being lyrical, the Allegro was soothing, as if heard in an
elevator, but even more boring.  Once again, the conclusion of the work
showed some improvement in being "music-like," but the Vivace was
excessively non troppo, torporously.

And so we came to better music, Faure's gorgeous Requiem, with Vance
George's great SFS Chorus at Ashkenazy's disposal.  How good is this
chorus?  So good that it succeeded without - no, in spite of - the
conductor.  Men and women mixed in ever section, in a configuration I
have not seen here before, the chorus sang serenely and beautifully,
while the whole work remained somewhat shapeless, not as much as the
Franck and Honegger, but similarly.  The music lingered, instead of
moving forward; lines were not sustained and completed under the conductor's
baton.

The two young, talented substitutes did the job, but both visually and
audibly tense and careful, instead of celebrating the music as they both
could and would, given the right kind of leadership.  Folland's single
aria was just adequate, Alexander's two contributions well sung, but
too circumpect, almost meek, not so much reflecting the text as lacking
vitality (of which the singer, heard in other performances, has plenty).

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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