In recent seasons Music Director Eun Sun Kim has led the San Francisco Opera Orchestra in one-off concerts featuring the symphonic repertory; the most recent of these, featuring works by Manuel de Falla as well as the Beethoven 5, was the first of these I have attended. It was an enjoyable evening, & the Opera House was full & enthusiastic.
For the opener, mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack came out, looking exceedingly glam in a low-cut gown of a deep iridescent purple, with ruffles cascading down one side & her dark hair swept up, to perform de Falla's Siete canciones populares españolas (Seven Popular Songs). I don't know how many other members of the audience had these songs in the back of their minds, memories conjured up through Mack's warm, rich voice. Though they sound typically "Spanish", they also evoke different moods & modes, from the wistful regrets of El paño moruno (The Moorish Cloth), about a once-fine cloth for sale that goes for a lower price because it is stained (Ay!) – draw your own metaphorical conclusions – to the bitter edge of lost love in Canción (Song), but I found the loveliest to be Nana (Lullaby), a soothing & sad midpoint to the set.
I would happily have heard more of Mack, but after her seven songs she left the stage, & we were given a Suite from de Falla's ballet music for El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat). Again, a piece evocative of an idealized Spain of an earlier time, a vaguely foreign world of swirling flamenco dancers, in its colors & rhythms. Kim shaped a lively performance. In the full ballet there is a witty quotation of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth, which she had worked back into this suite: a preview of coming attractions, as it were.
The opening of the Beethoven 5 is of course possibly the most famous moment in "classical" music, known to those who know nothing else, similar to "To be or not to be" for classic theater, a phrase similar in its stripped-down daring, its challenge to our existential being. I can't remember the last time I heard the Beethoven 5 played live! This is true of many of the "standards" – how often have we actually heard them live, & how recently? That's especially true if you're a long-time concert-goer, who probably, after many decades of attendance, & in the face of dwindling time, money, & energy, automatically avoids these standards. And then something happens, & we end up hearing them again, & we wonder why we don't listen to them all the time, as they have so much to give. If you keep house the way I do, you frequently have the experience of coming across something you only vaguely remembered that you owned, & finding in it, as if it were Christmas morning, the enchantments of new discovery. Revisiting the basic repertory is like that.
The performance struck me as vivid & full of tensile energy, fleet rather than ponderous. There was enthusiastic applause after the first two movements (I don't know if people were unaware of not clapping between movements, or if, in the style of our day, they didn't care about that convention); as the third movement moved right into the finale, there was no interruption then for applause, & we moved right into the blazing conclusion. Bits of this symphony have floated through my mind since I heard this performance. Through a developing struggle to some sort of breakthrough: it's an encouraging message for us, in our troubled times. I was very glad to hear this music again, played so beautifully, & I hope I never again take Beethoven or this symphony for granted.
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