Van Zweden Takes the Fifth

 

Davies Symphony Hall

Jaap van Zweden, the outgoing music director the NY Philharmonic, was the guest conductor last week at San Francisco Symphony.

I heard JvZ live only once before, at the Chicago Symphony in November, 2016. At that concert, he conducted the instrumental version of the Prelude and Liebestodt fromWagner's Tristan und Isolde, Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music, and the Brahms Requiem, the big piece on the program. I don't seem to have written a blog post about it, and it was months before I blogged about the primary reason I was in Chicago, performances at Lyric Opera of Berlioz's Les Troyens. 

I do remember not really liking anything on the program. The Wagner was stodgy, the Mozart had little sparkle, the Brahms was at best okay. The orchestra's ensemble wasn't great; nothing seemed to hang together.

My other experience with van Zweden was reviewing the first two installments of his concert performances, with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, of Wagner's Der Ring des Niebelungen. I though the casting a very mixed bag (Matthias Goerne as Wotan? Petra Lang as Brünnhilde??); I thought the orchestra had a poor sense of style; I thought the conducting off in various ways. I was not at all surprised to learn that he'd never conducted a staged Wagner opera. They lack drama, and I disliked them enough that I declined to review Siegfried and Götterdämmergung. (Those reviews were published in Leitmotiv, the journal of the Northern California Wagner Society; if you'd like copies, let me know.)

All of this throat-clearing is prefatory to saying that did my best to go into Thursday's performance with an open mind, because you never know when you're about to see a great performance. Performers can surprise you!

And indeed, I was very, very pleasantly surprised by van Zweden's account of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. It was colorful, flexibly conducted, well paced, and with plenty of drama. It was an excellent performance and I have no complaints about it. I wasn't taking notes, and I also haven't got a lot of details to provide about it.

On the other hand, wow, the other big 5 on the program, the one by Beethoven? Ooof. I didn't like it at all, although I'll note that nearly everyone else in the audience gave it a standing ovation.

What didn't I like? Well, the whole darned thing sounded grayish, without a lot of color; the tempos, while not in Norrington territory, were fast and did not work well, because van Zweden trampled on a lot of fermatas and rests and did not give the music room to breathe or space for the fermatas and rests to make their various structural points. The gorgeous second movement came off as perfunctory and without nuance. There was little mystery in the initial statement of the scherzo, or in its ghost, which returns in the last movement.

It was not anywhere near as bad as the truly dreadful Schubert Great C Major Symphony that Manfred Honeck conducted last year, which was super-fast for its own sake and consequently lost all detail. It just wasn't really good, and the Shostakovich showed what van Zweden is capable of. I don't know if the Beethoven just got the short end of the rehearsal time stick, or what. 

I was also reminded that I missed the last performance of Beethoven's 5th, two years ago during the Omircron COVID surge. I believe that it was on a program with the Nielsen Fifth, a quirky and fabulous symphony, and that Herbert Blomstedt conducted it. I turned in my ticket, which I deeply, deeply regret.

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle, is more enthused about the Beethoven than I am. I agree completely about principal flute Yubeen Kim, who has a gorgeous sound that he can vary at will.
• Rebecca Wishnia, SFCV
• DB at Kalimac

Previously:

• Alex Ross, TNY, on van Zweden's appointment. Note the remarks in both New Yorker articles about Salonen, for whose presence in SF I am grateful, however long his tenure here might be.
• Alex Ross, TNY, on various issues around the NYPO's search for a music director, including a review of a JvZ concert that included Beethoven's Fifth.
• Zachary Woolfe reviews the same concert in the NY Times (gift link)