For Michael Tilson Thomas to take up the Bruckner 9th in the house formerly
occupied by "Bruckner specialist" Herbert Bloomstedt took a certain amount
of chutzpah.

But he pulled it off beautifully.  This was a clean, precise, masterful,
brisk (26"/9"/26"/20") reading, quite different from Bloomstedt's, which
was slower, fuzzier, more from the inside of the music.  And, almost, it
turned out to be a landmark San Francisco Symphony performance.  Almost.

The downside of a great, big, personal-best performance is that everything
after that will be compared to it.  For MTT, at least in San Francisco, it
was the Mahler Fifth Symphony that was all one piece, perfect.

The Bruckner Ninth tonight began with an enormously successful first
movement, one of the best I have heard:  moving forward with power and
confidence, romantic and yet unsentimental, huge waves of sound washing
over Davies Hall.  Of all sections -- each at its best -- the strings,
doing their Repetitive Stress Syndrome-defying most, were simply fabulous.

Just one of the many splendid things in the first movement was the way
MTT understood and honored the tricky thing about Bruckner that Michael
Steinberg's program notes summed up so simply:

"Bruckner's favorite method of getting from one thing to the next -- a
method that earned him much derision on the part of the Brahmsians -- was
simply to stop, take a breath, and resume." The super-clean cutoffs tonight
and the pauses both separating and connecting passages were remarkable.

Then came the Scherzo, and the performance got better, although that
didn't seem possible.  This was MTT's magic, with a more robust and daring
interpretation than any Bruckner specialist would ever think of.  It was
both astonishing and amusing:  a Russian Bruckner!  Lots of Stravinsky, a
bit of Prokofiev in the pizzicato, even Tchaikovsky in the singing theme --
things I never heard before.  Nine minutes of gripping, breathtaking drama.

And, on to the Adagio, and that's where the magic ended, and `only'
competence took over:  it was a fine, but not particularly memorable
performance, MTT taking it from the outside, not getting into and singing
this sublime music from the heart.  Here, the "all-of-one-piece" test was
not met.

The concluding Te Deum also came across as more brilliant sound than
Bruckner's ecstatic vision.  Vance George's SFS Chorus blew the walls
down, did fine, although diction was uncharacteristically sloppy.  Julia
Faulkner, Michelle De Young, Vinson Cole and Eric Owens provided a bright
quartet, whetting the appetite to hear more from them than Bruckner had in
mind.

I have no doubt that MTT's Bruckner -- including the Ninth -- will grow,
become more "spiritual" than a virtuoso performance as time goes on.
Maybe even by tomorrow or on Saturday.

If you want to see what cannot be improved upon, check out Steinberg's
program notes:  http://www.sfsymphony.com/hframe9899season.htm

[log in to unmask] (text only)
[log in to unmask]