Turn It Up or Turn It Down.

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Usually, when you hear a performance that's substantially different from what you're used to hearing, you think one of two things:

• Wow, that was great, I've never heard it done that way before and it really made sense!
• WTF that was just wrong-headed.

This week's San Francisco Symphony program, conducted by Robin Ticciati and heard on Friday, February 28, fell into the second bullet, at least to my ear. 

I was apparently the only person in the room who disliked what Ticciati and debuting pianist Francesco Piemontesi did with Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4. Let's start with a couple of decisions that Ticciati made: he used a smallish orchestra, and had the strings play with minimal vibrato.

It just did not work. It dulled the orchestral sound considerably; the orchestra didn't come close to filling Davies; the piano, a standard 9-foot Steinway was louder than the orchestra a lot of the time. 

I don't want the orchestra overpowering the piano and I don't want the piano overpowering the orchestra. This was just wrong. If you're going to perform this concerto with the orchestra playing in a HIP-ish style, use a fortepiano, not a Steinway, and find a smaller venue, too. Herbst is right down the block.

Moreover, I thought the orchestral ensemble was not good at their first entry; I thought that Piemontesi's phrasing was eccentric; I thought that he smudged the decorations at the beginning of the third movement and elsewhere; I thought he lacked wit. It's a great piece and didn't come over as one.

What to say about Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony? It is a big, wooly piece with - again, to my ear - a loosey-goosey structure, which Ticciati did not succeed in tightening up. The whole thing felt loose around the edges, without a lot of forward momentum and pulse except in the second and fourth movements. And it is long. By the end I certainly understood why conductors have trimmed it in various ways over the years, not that I think they should.

Previously:

• Joshua Kosman, SF Chronicle.  "It was Ticciati’s slack leadership that made Widmann’s concerto sound so gray and meandering, when the music is actually anything but." That is...what I heard last night.
• Lisa Hirsch, SFCV.