Blomstedt at 99

Herbert Blomstedt

Photo by J.M. Pietsch / Courtesy of San Francisco Symphony

Herbert Blomstedt, Conductor Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, turned 99 yesterday, and Medici.tv has a nice article about him on their website (I think it is not paywalled). I wanted to note that since his unfortunate Mahler 9 in San Francisco, he has withdrawn from a couple of engagements. There was one in Sweden where Alan Gilbert stepped in.

Blomstedt has subsequently withdrawn from three October concerts in Japan, with the NHKSO. The conductor noted the following:

To my dear audience in Japan

I am so sorry that I cannot come to play with my dear orchestra in Tokyo in October, when conducting in May in San Francisco I was struck by a serious infection that will take several months to overcome. But – be of good courage – the great music of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner will always remain for our enjoyment. I will be with you in spirit, and will never forget you. Thank you for all you have been to me.

Herbert Blomstedt

Wishing him a happy 99th birthday, and of course hoping his health recovers as swiftly and completely as possible. 

Exciting Times at Davies

Davies Symphony Hall, S.F.

Photo by Lisa Hirsch

Exciting, yes, in good and not so good ways. Perhaps most importantly, I interviewed San Francisco Symphony music director designate Elim Chan for SFCV the day the announcement of her appointment went out. Yes, you could say that I'm happy about this! She is an excellent conductor and I think will be a good fit with the orchestra and the city. She was also a lot of fun to talk to. (I never interviewed Michael Tilson Thomas or Esa-Pekka Salonen, her immediate predecessors, which I greatly regret.)

The day after, Cristian Mǎcelaru led the orchestra in an incendiary performance, including Embers, by Tyler Taylor, winner of the Emerging Black Composers Project award, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1, with Simon Trpčeski, and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, "From the New World." Trpčeski is not only a terrific pianist, he is a classy guy: he dedication one encore to Elim Chan – who was in Loge A with SFS CEO Matthew Spivey – and the other, which included associate concertmaster Wyatt Underhill, to MTT.

I also reviewed conductor laureate Herbert Blomstedt's program, which consisted only of Mahler's Symphony No. 9, and which turned out to be an unfortunate occasion. Blomstedt arrived in S.f. in a sufficiently exhausted state that he spent several days in the hospital, with David Robertson taking over rehearsals. By the day of this concert, he had recovered enough that, it seems, he insisted on leading the last rehearsal and conducting the concert.

It did not go well. He was escorted in a wheelchair to the podium, where several people helped him onto the podium and the piano bench from which he was conducting. During the third movement, he started listing to the right and it appeared he might fall off. The music stopped; the helpers came out; they swapped the bench for an armchair. The music went on, but it was scary for the audience (and I'm sure the musicians) and not entirely clear how in charge of the performance Blomstedt was. 

He withdrew from the remaining two performances, which Robertson conducted, and has subsequently withdrawn from scheduled performances in Sweden, which Alan Gilbert led.

There was a lot of discussion about Blomstedt on Facebook, both before and after the concert, by members of the public and members of the orchestra. This kind of situation – reviewing a concert where a performer is very old, or ill, or merely getting to the end of their career – needs to be handled carefully. If the performer is a Herbert Blomsted, who is nearly 99 years old, or a Michael Tilson Thomas, who performed after surgery for a brain tumor, their performances are occasions, not just concerts, and should be reviewed with that in mind.

I attended most of MTT's post-diagnosis performances, and, well, were they the best performances I heard from him? Mostly not – but it didn't matter, because they were as much about who he was and what he meant to the audience as about the quality of the performances. Similarly with any performances by Herbert Blomstedt, an honored and much-loved past music director of the orchestra.

 

Then and Then

 Iron Tongue of Midnight is 20 today!

• Read my first three posts, in which I introduce myself and blame Alex Ross (sorry, Alex!).
• Read my first professional review, which was published in SFCV and then lost in an unfortunate data loss there. (Sorry, everyone! I think I'm doing better now.)
• Read Joshua Kosman's take on the same concert.

And take a moment to rejoice in the continued presence, at age 97, of Herbert Blomstedt, Conductor Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, on podiums the world over. He'll be with SFS on January 30, 31, and February 1, 2025, leading Schubert 5 and Brahms 1.

Jukka-Pekka Saraste at San Francisco Symphony

 

Davies Symphony Hall

When Herbert Blomstedt, age 96, took a fall fairly recently, his doctors advised him to limit his upcoming travel, which meant that orchestras on two continents needed to find substitutes for concerts he had planned to conduct. One of Blomstedt's engagements was with San Francisco Symphony, where he was music director for a decade and where he holds the title of Conductor Laureate. (MTT is the Music Director Laureate, if you're wondering.) He is loved in San Francisco, for his excellent conducting, humanity, and astounding longevity, so of course there was disappointment that he wouldn't be conducting this season.

SFS hired the Finnish conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste to take over Blomstedt's program. Both of the planned works were retained; you would expect any major-league conductor to have Schubert 6 and Beethoven 7 in their repertory. Saraste is that, having held a number of important posts, and having recently succeeded Susanna Mälkki at the Helsinki Philharmonic.

I was not happy with what I heard. I found Saraste's interpretations on the dull side. The orchestral sound was blocky and undifferentiated, lacking sonic clarity without a compensating sense of warmth. Sometimes the winds and brass would be too prominent when all they were doing was providing background rhythmic punctuation. Transitions stumbled and didn't help the listener with the works' structure. 

The dullness and lack of sonic differentiation were big problems in the Beethoven, where there's so much thematic repetition - everything sounded the same. Interpretively, there wasn't much wit or grace. Saraste's tempos were on the quick side, but that wasn't a problem in and of itself; we've heard some mighty fast Beethoven from Esa-Pekka Salonen, and, well, he can make that work, and has, in the 2nd, 3rd, and oh, right, 7th symphonies.

Everything I'm saying here applies about equally to the Schubert and the Beethoven. See Joshua Kosman's reviews of last night and a program in 1997, which I link to below. I'm curious what the SFCV reviewer thought.

Elsewhere:

• Joshua Kosman, Chronicle. 
• [SFCV link to follow]

Previously:

• Me, writing about Salonen's LvB 7th
• Joshua Kosman on Saraste's 1997 performances at SFS. This is an excellent description of what I heard last night: "The slow introduction to the first movement moved in herky-jerky chunks; the orchestral balances, in the two outer movements especially, seemed calculated for maximum weight and minimum detail...Beethoven's fluid melodies, meanwhile -- again most regrettably in the outer movements -- were casually dispatched, as though they were merely decorative gold braid atop a Sherman tank. Only Saraste's zesty reading of the scherzo proved convincing."

Tattling: Toward the end of the Beethoven scherzo - say, maybe a minute or 90 seconds before the end - a phone went off in the row behind me. And went off and went off and went off. It was playing...piano music? I turned around and looked at the person whose phone it obviously was. The patron next to me did the same. The woman sitting next to the guilty party gestured to him and I think maybe tapped him a couple of times. She must have been an intimate because eventually she started rifling through his pockets. Eventually, she found the phone and silenced it, but only after the scherzo had ended and the last movement had begun. This episode was unnerving and unpleasant, because of the interruption and because of its length. There's a reason that SFS has polite announcements before every concert asking audience members to silence all electronic devices. (For the last two weeks, flutist and principal piccolo Cathy Payne has been the orchestra member whose recorded announcement is used.)

I do not care how you dress. I support applause between movements. I hope that you won't wear perfume. And I deeply wish that you would silence your phone/pager/other potentially noisy electronic device before the concert starts and at the end of intermission, if you've turned it back on.=-=