You just never know.

One of the many joys of gambling on live symphony concerts is that the
early betting line is usually wrong.  And so it was tonight, in Davies
Hall, as the San Francisco Symphony offered an intriguing world premiere
- Michael Tilson Thomas' "Urban Legend" (a concerto for contrabassoon
and orchestra, featuring Steven Braunstein); Bartok's infrequently-performed,
tough masterpiece, "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta," and -
ho-hum - the zillionth performances of the old Richard Strauss warhorse,
"Ein Heldenleben."

Yup.  The Strauss "won," not by a nose or a head, but by a mile. It
was a thrilling, great performance, one for the archives and recording
machines (KDFC-FM may broadcast it at 8 p.m., PDT, on Tuesday, Oct.  15,
although that needs to be confirmed).  Thursday night, the orchestra
will travel to Davis to perform the same program at the opening of Mondavi
Center there.

MTT conducted an orchestra on fire, brass and celli leading the way,
concertmaster Alexander Barantschik channeling the previous owner of his
Guarnerius, Jascha Heifetz, in that veritable violin-concerto section
of the work, playing magnificently.

It was orchestral playing of luminous clarity, everything parsed to
perfection, the music unfolding on a straight beam of light, with logic,
cohesion, passion, everything in the right place, the right way, and yet
with the sense of improvisation, of discovery.

The Bartok, on the other hand, was a disappointment, especially the first
movement.  Against two miraculous performances of the work I heard last
month in Edinburgh and London, with Claudio Abbado and the Gustav Mahler
Jugendorchester, the slow-moving "night music" of the Andante tranquillo
in Davis Hall was virtually another work.

Where the "kids" produced the opening mysterious murmur section by
section, clearly, distinctly, the various strands converging into a
subdued but enormously broad tutti, their elders in San Francisco played
"general-orchestral sound" music, seemingly without feeling or conviction,
certainly without tension pulling together notes, phrases, even the
silences between notes.

The Davis performance picked up considerably by the last two more lively
movements, the percussion section playing its collective heart out, Robin
Sutherland's piano cutting a path to the music, as it should.  But
over-all, whatever it was that made "Ein Heldenleben" such an exciting,
satisfying performance just wasn't there for most of the Bartok, not
yet, anyway.

The full title of MTT's composition is "Urban Legend, for Contrabassoon,
Strings and Percussion," and although its immediate inspiration, according
to the composer, was Sibelius' "The Swan of Tuonela," its orchestration,
double-orchestra positioning and programming neighbor all relate it to
the Bartok.

The title is the product of a somewhat labored thought process
beginning with the Swan of Tuonela, which - in Finnish legend - swims
around the island of the dead.  MTT describes trying to find a contemporary,
American parallel, and the existence of wild creatures living near cities
- alligators near Miami, bears wondering around Santa Fe (where the work
was composed), and so on.

What must be the perspective of such animals of humans, the composer
wondered.  "For them, much of what we are must be the noise we produce:
car horns, sirens, industrial sounds, talking, singing, partying," MTT
wrote in the program notes.  "We make more noise than any sensible animal
would, but even the noise-scape of our civilization quiets down fro some
period during the night, which is when these animals tend to be most
active.  `Urban Legend' is the nocturne of such a night."

This interesting, entertaining 16-minute mini-symphonic-poem begins with
the "sound from the deep" that characterizes the Bartok Andante, music
emerging from a din, then coming to the fore, aggressively.  On first
hearing, there seems an excessive amount sound-for-sound's-sake, walls
of sound rather the music, but a mini-cadenza for Braunstein's growling
bravura instrument picks up the proceedings.

There are no discernible melodies or even musical lines in "Urban Legend,"
but a great deal of Stravinsky-Copland-Bernstein musical tension and
forward momentum.  Much of it is "pointilistic" in its vocabulary, lots
of staccato, pizzicato, few long lines or legato.

The concluding section - a lively tutti dissolving into jazzy syncopation
- was perhaps the best part of the work, punctuated by the composer-conductor
leaping high into the air, half-shouting a "YESSSS!" that would be just
the right thing after scoring a game-winning point.  Still, that "win"
had to wait until after intermission and the memorable Strauss.

Janos Gereben/SF
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