DAVIS - Ah, there was good news Thursday night on the (economic)
weather-beaten American classical-music scene.

A splendid new multi-purpose concert hall is now open for business, part
of the $57 million, 104,000-square foot Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center,
on the University of California Davis campus, 70 miles east of San
Francisco, as the crow flies.

There are lots of crows in the wide open fields around this spectacularly
well-designed campus, which provides the right background for the boxy
but pleasant building, with clean lines, good access and designed (by
BOORA Architects of Portland, Oregon) for the people's convenience - a
novel approach these days.

 From easy parking, to spacious lobby areas converging on three levels,
to comfortable, non-squeaky seats, Jackson Hall is a mighty fine addition
to California's performance spaces.  Winemaker Mondavi pledged $10 million
to the hall (while putting up $25 million for a future institute of wine
and food science, to be built next door).  The hall was named for Barbara
K.  and W.  Turrentine Jackson, in recognition of a $5 million donation
from the late scholar's research into Wells Fargo Bank's origins, work
rewarded by stocks, which have increased exponentially over the years.
(Yes, children, there was a time when stocks...)

For an 1,800-seat concert hall, the new facility doesn't feel
overwhelmingly large, although one wonders where such big audiences
will come from here in the open fields; organizers remain positive and
optimistic.  They need to maintain that attitude, especially at a time
of falling concert attendance elsewhere.

As with the sandstone exterior, clean lines prevail in the interior as
well; the Douglas fir paneling, combined with light tan stone, is bright
and handsome.

One is somewhat apprehensive when acousticians - McKay, Conant, Brook -
speak of "motorized draperies" and "reverberation modification," and,
indeed, not all is well.  Those fancy devices will have to be used for
adjustments in the future.  And yet, the hall-inaugurating concert by
the San Francisco Symphony, under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas,
went well, by and large.

As a veteran of both the NY Philharmonic Hall and the SF Davies Hall
disasters (the latter eventually fixed, the former not quite, ever), I
am glad to report that Jackson Hall does not need restructuring the day
after opening - the sad task, long ago, before the New York and San
Francisco botcher-uppers.

Listening from the second-level grand tier, where the Mondavis sat too,
and later from the back of the orchestra, I didn't miss anything - quiet
passages, a solo violin, even the contra bassoon all came through, and
there were no noticeable echoes.

Against the happy news of "nothing bad" comes the initial impression
of "nothing great." The sound on this premiere occasion had a hooded,
covered, slightly mushy quality, a sense of distance, as if bass was
cranked up too high and treble turned down.  Listening to the same program
the night before, in Davies Hall (which has 1,000 seats more), the music
was clearer, cleaner, brighter, more "forward."

For a review of the music, see the Wednesday report, below.  Not much
changed in the Jackson Hall performance, except for an over-all improvement
in the Bartok (except for the first movement, still stodgy) and the fact
that acoustics in Davis on Thursday turned the loud passages in the
Strauss into somewhat of a din, while they were just thrilling the night
before.  And MTT didn't end "Urban Legend" with a fist-pumping YESSSS!
He did, however, liked the hall just fine, which may indicate that the
musicians hear each other well on stage - a good thing.

Music-from-the-Depths and a Peak Performance [3 October]

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).

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, converging layers 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 Davies 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.

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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