In 23 years of performances here, since his Merola days, seldom has
Thomas Hampson sung better than tonight.  He stood and delivered in
Davies Hall, almost completely without the mannerisms that had crept
up in his appearances in recent years.

The voice was warm, natural, unpushed, unwavering; diction - as always
- flawless, the interpretation straightforward, committed, just right.

In one of Michael Tilson Thomas's unusual and interesting San Francisco
Symphony programs, Hampson followed Richard Strauss' all-brass "Festival
Music for the City of Vienna" with two orchestral songs, one hardly
known, the other known even less.

You might have encountered the four-minute "Hymnus" before, one of the
composer's most overwrought, glorious exercises in romantic excess, a
pounding, harp- and string-filled surfeit of "golden light...  flowing
essence...  eternal spirit...  wreathes of laurel." Audience members
with long memory recall that Thomas Allen sang it here first, in 1985,
Wolfgang Sawallisch conducting.

Rarer than hen's teeth, "Notturno" is the first of two songs of Strauss'
Opus 44, named in the Prussian manner "Two Larger Songs for Deep Voice
with Orchestral Accompaniment." With a 14-minute length, "Notturno" might
have easily had the other song tacked on to the program, but that didn't
happen, so chances are that we'll never hear it.

Featuring a great deal of narrative (Richard Dehmel's poem about moon,
swoon, pain, tears, guilt, sorrow and the moon - "hung high, and gentle
and weary" - returning at the end), "Notturno" sounds a bit like a talky
transition passage between two high points in "Capriccio."

Both pieces feature extensive obbligato by the concertmaster, and it
was a heartwarming (and well-justified) action when Hampson took Nadya
Tichman's hand, and half-dragged her to center stage for a joint bow.

MTT programmed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for the second half of the
concert, and it turned out to be my third encounter of the day with the
work.

In the afternoon, there was a preview screening of "Taking Sides," Istvan
Szabo's film version of Ronald Harwood's play about the denazification
investigation of Wilhelm Furtwangler.  Snippets of the Beethoven Fifth
run through the film, some from Furtwangler recordings, but for the
opening scene, in "an unprecedented attempt to re-create a historical
musical event" (says the press release).

To show a concert in the old Berlin Philharmonic Hall in 1943, interrupted
by an Allied air raid, the scene has Daniel Barenboim's Berlin Staatskapelle
impersonate the Philharmonic (there may be an interesting story behind
the real Philharmonic's refusal to participate), with Stellan Skarsgard,
who plays Furtwangler, waving his arms.

Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, there is Barenboim "reproducing Furtwangler's
tempi and nuances, directing the orchestra...  with headphones in order
to replicate as far as reasonably possible for the digital age, the
unique sound and dramatic intensity of Furtwangler's interpretation."
My!  There is nothing simple about the long-hair music business in
Hollywood.

How is the movie?  Pretty awful.  Imagine a film about Furtwangler with
the sum total of the Fifth fragments, a bit of Bruckner, a few measures
of a Schubert Quintet...  and nothing more.

The play itself, having taken on a very large and complex topic - the
dilemma of the artist in a country gone mad: to escape, to stay, to
cooperate for self-preservation, for doing good, etc.  - suffered from
purple, overheated, improbable prose, from mixing reality and fantasy
badly.

Now, although Szabo is an outstanding director, the film was doomed
from the start because of the casting.  The role of the out-of-control,
scenery-chewing Army major in charge of the investigation went to Harvey
Keitel, who amplified and exaggerated the already louder-than-life
character, crossing the sound barrier and the threshold of viewer pain.
Barenboim's dubbing was all for naught.

As for the San Francisco Symphony's continued presentation of singers
once more at home across Grove Street, in the War Memorial, Hampson will
be succeeded in Davies Hall next week by Laura Claycomb in Mahler's
Fourth Symphony, and by Monica Groop, Matthew Polenzani and Samuel Ramey
in Berlioz's "Romeo and Juliet," Oct.  8-11.  MTT will conduct both
series.

The program will Hampson runs through Sunday, and will be broadcast on
KDFC-FM (www2.kdfc.com) at 8 p.m. PDT, Sept. 30.

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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