Adès gets TKO'd by Mendelssohn

This photo by Blizzard Terrak is titled "ax11 All Alone on Walpurgis Night" and is much more interesting that yet another boring image of Felix Mendelssohn, don't you agree?

At the end of the 2008/09 season the MTT and the San Francisco Symphony had a Schubert/Berg festival titled "From Dawn to Twilight." The programming of the individual concerts made little sense to me, but the juxtaposition of the first and second Viennese School heavyweights looked good on paper and the concerts were highly rewarding, especially if one favored Berg in the match-up. Schubert lost every round until the last one, when he handily stomped Berg's Chamber Concerto into the mat with his symphony commonly known as "The Great," which is kind of fitting if you like boxing metaphors, and I obviously do. On paper the match-up of Felix Mendelssohn and Thomas Adès must have made sense to someone, but the real common thread (works inspired by Shakespeare are plentiful and thus seems a bit lame) remained hidden to me even after attending the final program, which heavily favored Mendelssohn by featuring two complete, substantial works of his against excerpts from one by Adès. It was never going to be a fair fight, even if for many, including myself, Adès' music was the main event.

The Suite from A Midsummer Night's Dream (1843) was up first and though lengthy, it was well-played, and featured an especially lovely solo from Nicole Cash. It's also crammed with familiar music, so much so that those of us who don't count ourselves as fans of Felix probably kept saying to the themselves, "Oh yes, that... Oh, that too? ...Oh yes, I forgot about this part..." for a good chunk of the half hour. I would never seek the piece the out, but much of it was pleasing, if not really illuminating, and that pretty much sums up how I felt about Mendelssohn at this point.

What followed this good-natured music was something else entirely, a series of scenes from Adès' The Tempest, which I've neither seen nor heard, having so far missed the Met's transmissions of it, but it's an opera I'm quite keen to experience so I was quite curious this. Unfortunately, at least on a cold hearing and without having any musical context to place the scenes in, I found myself constantly see-sawing between the music and the vocal writing and never really being able to fully absorb either. Some of this may be due to the fantastically bizarre writing Adès has come up with for the character of Ariel, written at an astonishingly high level that makes the Queen of the Night's famous aria from The Magic Flute look easy by comparison. It sounded punishing, but it was fascinating to watch (and hear) soprano Audrey Luna take it on, even if I could hardly understand a word she was singing without consulting the program. Rod Gilfrey as Prospero sounded better than I have ever heard him, and Alek Shrader and Isabel Leonard, in the less-showy parts, were in fine voice, but without a doubt this was a showcase for Luna's extraordinary abilities and Adès' boundary-pushing writing for the voice. This was so much the case the music actually left little impression on me- as soon I turned my attention from the singers to the orchestra, I found myself switching back to the singers within moments. By all accounts I've read, The Tempest is widely regarded as an appealing, rewarding contemporary opera, but this excerpt probably confused rather than sold an audience unfamiliar with its virtues.

The second half of the concert featured Mendelssohn's The First Walpurgis Night, and this was simply a fantastic performance on every level. Guest conductor/referee of the Mendelssohn/Adès  match Pablo Heras-Casado was really connecting with the orchestra here, and superb contributions came from the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Gilfrey, Shrader, and mezzo-soprano Charlotte Hellekant. Interestingly, the material is inspired by Goethe's Faust, so this is the second time in as many months we've seen a musical interpretation of the scene as it was also featured in Boito's opera Mefistofele, recently presented by San Francisco Opera. Musically, Mendelssohn's take on Goethe blows Boito's out of the water because it feels like a cohesive whole, but more to the point, the exuberance of the music and the gusto of the singing overshadowed everything which came before it, leaving me to wonder why I've always been largely indifferent to Mendelssohn, especially when considering how much I appreciated last week's performance of his "Scottish" Symphony. But somehow, I don't think converting listeners to the merits of Mendelssohn was the intent of the festival. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.