The Symphony Has An Italian Adventure
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Saturday, March 10, 2001
©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/10/DD178160.DTL

Aside from the ones born there, all European composers make their way to Italy sooner or later, and Richard Strauss was no exception. And since everything he ever saw, read, thought or experienced was transmuted into music,

his three-month visit to the south soon became "Aus Italien" ("From Italy"), a sort of proto-tone poem that had its first San Francisco Symphony performance in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday night.

Italy, in fact, was the thread linking the entire program of guest conductor Roberto Abbado -- perhaps even Italy and travel. The first half was devoted to works by two cosmopolitan Italians, Luigi Cherubini (who spent most of his career in Paris) and Luciano Berio, whose American sojourns included an influential teaching stint at Mills College.

And if the level of execution was rather mixed all evening -- Abbado drew lustrous sounds from the orchestra, only to weaken their effect through the rhythmic laxity of his conducting -- give him credit for one of the more adventurous subscription programs of the season.

"Aus Italien" actually turned out to be the least interesting aspect of the concert. This is not the only Strauss score that manages to be enormously impressive -- virtuosic, even -- without being particularly good.

Each of its four movements offers a musical postcard from Rome, Sorrento or Naples, but the pictorialism is less important than the enormous technical resources that he had already had available at 22. Strauss works the orchestra with vigor, spins out melodies endlessly and leads the listener into some recherche harmonic backwaters.

Yet to these ears at least there is a garishness and lack of taste about it all -- not just the concluding counterpoint exercises on "Funiculi, funicula." Only the evocative "On the Beach at Sorrento," with its delicately scored harmonies, really pays off.

There was greater pleasure to be had from Berio's "Requies" (completed in 1987), a tribute to his late wife, Cathy Berberian. This 13-minute chamber work moves along on dense, alluring clouds of sound, in which tonal harmonies and eloquent vocal melodies seem to linger tantalizingly out of reach.

Berio has always been among the most ingratiating of modernists, and if the trajectory of "Requies" was obscure, its plainspoken sweetness was impossible to resist.

Cherubini's 1815 Symphony in D began the evening, also in its first Symphony performance. This is a wonderfully distinctive score, a melding of Classical-era symphonic concepts with French spectacle and Italianate lyricism.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle