ELOQUENCE MORE THAN ELEGANCE
                From Unanswered Questions to 76-Trombone Answers 
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of July 25-Aug. 2, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 119
          The San Francisco Symphony, winding down its Davies Hall season, serves up some summery pops-concert fare and popular classics like “Pictures at an Exhibition.” At the July 24 finale of “Summer and the Symphony” however came a surprise: A positively spell-binding rendition of Ives’ “The Unanswered Question” (1906), one of the great inspirations of this early American experimentalist.
          It takes two conductors working in different tempi, and three seemingly unrelated elements: A soft string continuum, a question repeatedly posed by a solo wind (here, the English horn in place of the prescribed trumpet), and a quartet of nattering flutes.
          Guest conductor Alondra de la Parra brought it off beautifully, toning down the strings until they were barely audible. Her audience was mesmerized, listening in pin-drop silence.
          Ives sought to pose the “perennial question of existence” via the unadorned solo, contrasted against the frantic attempts to answer by the atonal flutes---an enigma wrapped in mystery, as Churchill might have phrased it. Ives delighted in juxtaposing seemingly incompatible elements in a work, often sounded simultaneously. And he left huge latitude for the interpreter---yet another radical departure from the norm of that time.
          The bad-boy side of the rebel Ives emerges in the ”Variations on ‘America,’” with elements of dissonance, triple-time, and even a paso-doble episode with clacking castanets. Though some patriots inevitably decry Ives’ puckishness as being irreverent, probably no name symphonic composer ever created more bona-fide patriotic music than Ives.
          In another era, de la Parra would have been dismissed as young and pretty, little more. But the Mexican guest from New York City brought podium eloquence more than elegance to the fore, while also making authoritative impact in Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” featuring a gaunt bass-voice narration by TV star Chris Noth.
          Her task this week was all the more impressive in that each program got just a single two-hour rehearsal for preparation, magnified further by the numerous SFS substitutes---at least half the orchestra’s complement---working in the ranks. It was like running a speeding train careening down a winding mountain track, threatened by derailment at the slightest miscalculation. Fortunately, with de la Parra’s hand on the throttle, it all worked out.
          Other works included one of John Adams’ early minimalist hits, “Short Ride in a Fast Machine,” zooming by in the same time as a top mile runner, and Copland’s atmospheric “Three Latin-American Sketches” culminating in an infectious Jalisco dance.
          Sara Buechner, who won major piano awards in the mid-1980s when she was still Sara Davis, performed in “Rhapsody in Blue” showing inordinate agility when she was not being drowned out by the loud ensemble playing the original 1924 jazz-band version. That meant adding saxophones, a banjo, and trap set, and eliminating most of the rest of the SFS.
          The event, and season, concluded in festive fashion with “Seventy-Six Trombones” involving some 30 members of the University of California Marching Band in full stadium regalia, augmenting de la Parra's shirt-sleeved troops and all but knocking the roof off Davies Hall.
          Well, with the new season  not due to open till Sept. 7, there should be ample time for any needed repairs.