YOUTH MOVEMENT AT THE S.F. SYMPHONY
                    And Dallapiccola's "Music Is Not Mathematics!" 
<>                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Jan. 22-29, 2012
                                                                  Vol. 14, No. 42      
            New faces, and a youth movement in general, are gaining momentum at the S.F. Symphony over the next two months, led off by a Mediterranean program with three prime performers under the age of 35.
            Not all the names are manageable, least of all the highly poetic pianist Khatia Buniatishvili from Georgia, whose name we will all have to learn to pronounce, she is so talented. She brought off the sunny G Major Concerto by Ravel with a silky touch and refined rubato.  There was sparkle in her sprightly fast passages, and nuance in the slow movement. She does not radiate great power, but she has an enviable touch indeed. And what shimmering tremolos!!
            Ravel was admittedly a Frenchman from the Basque country, but the piece is laced with Spanish touches such as languid “guitar strums” on the piano. Buniatishvili was complemented by the fine English horn solos of Russ deLuna in the Jan. 21 concert we heard.
            The big selection was the 26-minute ballet score “El amor brujo” (Love, the Sorcerer) of de Falla, featuring the expert throaty flamenco songs of stylist Marina Heredia, full of tricky flamenco dialect (“Love,” for instance, is el querer in Spanish, but er queré in this version). Apart from the three songs and the hit tone-painting excerpt “Ritual Fire Dance,” this music of many moods works best as accompaniment to dance, not as stand-alone.
            I went primarily to catch the wispy aphorisms of Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-75) in his eight-minute “Piccola musica notturna” (A Little Night Music, a title selected 19 years before Stephen Sondheim’s musical). Too little heard nowadays, the Italian composer was among the few 12-tone practitioners, along with Berg, who could be highly communicative in that rigorous medium. At a time in the 1960s when most 12-tone composers sounded more like theoreticians  than musicians, Dallapiccola visited the Berkeley campus and told me firmly, “Music is not about mathematics!!” Amen.
            This opus reminded me of Debussy’s murkier, foggier sound textures, full of short, isolated phrases and ghostly effects, beautifully interpreted under Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, who is 34 and looks about 19. Leading without a baton, he established a good rapport with the players and handled the four contrasting selections with aplomb. Look for him to get a major music-director job before long; his upcoming gig  with the Berlin Philharmonic may be the shove that opens big doors for him.
            The concert opened with Stravinsky’s  neoclassical “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto, written for 15 players  without guest soloist. Like the Ravel and de Falla, the Stravinsky too has been widely used for ballet and dance productions. With the S.F. Ballet opening its season next door at the Opera House the same night as this SFS opening, what could have been more appropriate than this dance-oriented program?
 <>        These San Francisco Symphony concerts continued through Jan. 21. For info: (415) 864-6000, or go  online. Broadcasts on KDFC-FM (102.1) at 8 p.m. on the second Tuesday following.

        ©Paul Hertelendy 2012
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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