Ruth Reinhardt at San Francisco Symphony

Ruth Reinhardt made her debut conducting at San Francisco Symphony this past week, and drew a program of Mason Bates's new piano concerto, written for Daniil Trifonov, a short work by Lotta Wennäkoski, and Dvorak's Fifth Symphony. 

Wennäkoski's Om fotspår och ljus (Of Footprints and Light) didn't make a huge impression, and I was mildly disconcerted by a distinct change of style and tone partway through, undoubtedly where the composer incorporated music from a mid-20th c. work by a different composer. I also didn't take any notes, so, not much to say.

The Bates....what to say. I had mixed feelings (which shocked one friend), but sure, I liked some aspects of it. Trifonov played with his accustomed fluency and smoothness; some of the musical materials were pretty and interesting to listen to. 

Overall, though? Well, none of the three movements had what I would call shape or direction or something resembling structure. Instead, it seemed as though Bates just keep picking up nice bits, looking at them, holding them up for us to see, putting them down, and moving on to the next nice bit. I thought that I would like the first movement more than I did; it's grounded in Renaissance music, but very much at a surface level. Bates incorporates what he thinks of as Renaissance timbres (a lot of plucked strings, the kind of percussion you'd hear on a Hesperion XXI record -- but Hesperion does it all better), while not taking anything structural from Renaissance music.

Some of it sounded awfully derivative and bizarrely sweet and trivial. The whole came across as...fakey and insincere, even condescending to the audience. This isn't the kind of thing I can prove, of course. "Fake" and "insincere" and "condescending" make assumptions about the composer's mindset, and I have no reason to think that Bates is other than sincere in his work. But this concerto didn't make a good overall impression on me.

One possibly relevant data point: I started getting mild hits of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini during the first movement. In the course of that work, Rachmaninoff cycles through a number of different styles himself, without directly parodying any of them. There's the louche jazzy number, the barn-storming appearance of the Dies Irae chant, and ever so much more. In about half the variations, I feel as though the composer is watching you listening and very slyly winking at you...but I never feel the slightest bit condescended to.

Reinhardt, though, did a terrific job with the piece. It's got complicated orchestration, and she kept everything coherent and sounding great. The Dvorak symphony that occupied the second half of the program was perfectly lovely, warm and stylish without being at all sentimental. I'd like to hear her again!

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chron
• David Bratman, SFCV