SHOSTAKOVICH AT HIS MOST ELOQUENT, ON THEMES OF DEATH 
<>                                              By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of Oct. 14-21,  2011
                                                                  Vol. 14, No. 15
            A collision of orchestras, and Russian programs in particular, again demonstrate how little our performing-arts groups communicate with one another.
            Two rare Russian programs were taking place with prime orchestras just 12 miles apart, splitting the audience between Valery Gergiev’s Kirov Orchestra in Berkeley (all-Tchaikovsky) and the San Francisco Symphony finally doing the locale premiere of Shostakovich’s masterful Symphony No. 14 (nearly four decades after the Bay Area premiere had been performed in Oakland). And later this month, the S.F. Opera Orchestra would also give one of their rare symphonic evenings.
            But the 52-minute Symphony No. 14 commanded the critical attention; it is one of the late Russian composer’s most deeply felt, most eloquent pieces, reflecting morbidly on death, meaningless life, lost love and prison/solitary, using just a chamber orchestra. No one had treated these themes at such length since arguably Mussorgsky almost a  century earlier. This is a song cycle, in Russian, calling on poetry of supreme despondency by the likes of Apollinaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Garcia Lorca. 
            If the 14th is not performed widely as, say, Mahler’s marginally similar “Das Lied von der Erde,” it’s for lack of contrasts. Here we get unremitting gloom and anguish, while Mahler is a man of many moods.
            This piece is rather operatic in feeling, and appropriately opera conductor James Conlon programmed it and led it effectively when heard Oct. 14. It was dramatized by soprano Olga Guryakova, who came into her own here---much more than in the “La Boheme” she had done across the street in an earlier season. Guryakova is a mesmerizing interpreter in this repertory, with a touch of Maria Callas in her, holding the audience in pindrop silence. The co-soloist was the veteran Sergei Leiferkus, now moved lower to a bass baritone---broad, rumbling, authoritative.
            Notable instrumental soloists were cellist Michael Grebanier, bassist Scott Pingel, and violist Jonathan Vinocur.
            Fortunately, Conlon prevented a mass trudge of would-be suicides from Davies Hall out to one of the bridges by following with a performance of the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a work of sheer joy, uplift and optimism.
             San Francisco Symphony, James Conlon conducting, through Oct. 16. Davies Hall, S.F. For info: (415) 864-6000, or go online. 
        ©Paul Hertelendy 2011
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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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