MOVING CLOSURE TO SCHUBERT-BERG FESTIVAL
                   With First SFS Play of Schubert's Great Mass No. 6   
                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of June 12-19, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 111
          The S.F. Symphony’s Schubert-Berg festival finally hit its stride, ringing out in dramatic fashion with stellar performances---the masterful, sensitive Berg Violin Concerto, paired with what you might call Schubert’s most dazzling (but unstaged) opera, the Mass No. 6.
            Neither of these composers a century apart was doctrinaire-religious. But both contributed here lasting and significant music from the church (as contrasted to music IN the church). Even though he wrote six masses, Schubert, the one-time Vienna Choir Boy, in fact was a rebellious sort. Among other things, he always omitted the mandatory Credo line of belief in “one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church.” (Supplemented versions must be used whenever performed as part of a mass in church.) While his early masses serve as apt and subdued accompaniment to pious prayer and reverence, the No. 6 is bursting out effusively like a shot of the Verdi that is yet to come, full of drama, power, pathos and symphonic subtlety.
            In clearly reflected the new mass-in-the-concert-hall, as recently established via Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and to be followed by many other 19th-century works such as the Berlioz Requiem. Although Gerhard Samuel’s Oakland Symphony had already performed it in the 1960s, the SFS had never performed it previously. Long overdue!!
            There is no room for pious prayer with this amazingly forward-looking mass completed shortly before Schubert’s untimely death at age 31. It demands our unbridled attention and focus through some 53 minutes of rather tempestuous choral-orchestral writing
            The chorus dominates; indeed we are halfway through before the first of the five vocal soloists is heard. There is a pronounced ebb and flow of volume; there are outbursts of trombones and timpani. And the Gloria is one of the boldest quasi-theatrical statements in all Schubert.
            Schubert was not into writing barcarolles; he wanted to produce the storm that nearly capsizes the boat. And later he shows, as in the simply Latin line for “Hosanna in the Highest,” that even there he can produce rousing drama. His compositional skill is obvious, nowhere more than in the two elaborate fugues he constructs for the chorus.
            Clearly, the SFS Chorus was the star here, leaving and breathing this Viennese vitality. And for once, most of the text was intelligible, with Ragnar Bohlin's singers repressing their habit of swallowing all the consonants. And Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas pulled out all the stops in the dramatization.
            The other half of the June 11 concert was Berg’s sole concerto, for violin, one of the great 20th-century examples of the genre. It commemorated the death of a family friend, the young Manon Gropius, but evolved into  Berg’s own epitaph, as he died unexpectedly the year of the premiere.
            As soloist, Gil Shaham is told to pull away from the orchestra and eventually dominate, but in actual fact his tone was often drowned out by the orchestra. His is a fine-honed tone, highly lyrical, in a way very consistent with Berg’s tribute to little Manon. In his fine annotation, MTT neglected to mention an obvious link between the composers: Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” and Berg’s concerto. As has been pointed out elsewhere, whereas Death comes first in Schubert’s music, the maiden precedes in Berg, turning to the memorial of resignation in Bach’s Cantata No. 60 that is quoted only toward the end.
            It is a work of deep feelings and emotions. Nevertheless Berg the perfectionist brings to bear his Bachian love of symmetry, not only via his 12-tone structure, but also starting and ending the concerto with open strings sounded sequentially, as if they were the curtain in a theater.
          The Schubert mass was dedicated to the memory of longtime SFS cellist Peter Shelton, 54, who had spent much of his time playing first chair (and prior to that, on the San Jose Symphony roster).
            These San Francisco Symphony & Chorus concerts continue through June 13 at 8 p.m. 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 2009
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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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