by Paul Hertelendy

Artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music 
December 9-16, 2003, Vol. 6, No. 46

SANTA ROSA---Sixty miles north of San Francisco in the heart of the Sonoma wine country, the 75-year-old Santa Rosa Symphony is enjoying a heyday under the baton of Jeffrey Kahane.

The recent concerts of Dec. 6-8 showed off a spirited, quality ensemble responsive to the deft Kahane touch as it brought forth an almost-all-American- &-20th-century program. Despite the unfamiliar fare, the orchestra has a huge and enthusiastic following. Who else can summon a 95%-full house on a Monday night for the likes of Bernstein, Shostakovich, and lesser-knowns? SRS must stand for Standing-Room-only Symphony.
  
Sometime piano competition laureate, frequent concert annotator, and also music director of the eminent Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Kahane is a versatile, inventive and seemingly indefatigable musician in the best sense. Before his main event he delivers the pre-concert lecture, then has to stumble back into the hall over the feet of front-row patrons to take the podium after catching his breath (as the tight stage was never designed with whole orchestras in mind).

The SRS orchestra is well-balanced, with only one weak section in evidence---a section which is usually the easiest to fortify. On this night, excellent solos emanated from principals like clarinetists Roy Zajac, who doubled on sax for Bernstein's Broadway foray, and bassoonist Carla Wilson (in Shostakovich's almost frivolous sendup of Soviet grandeur in his counter-culture Symphony No. 9).
 
In the MacDowell Piano Concerto No. 2, often billed as the first important American concerto even though written in Europe and suffused with the spirit of Liszt, the orchestra produced an ethereal opening for the larghetto calmato, before the fireworks were set loose. Soloist was Norman Krieger, a powerful but not consistently evocative Liszt interpreter already known from his recordings. But I won't blame him for the mushy bass notes, which were more likely the piano's doing. His subdued approach through most of the 26-minute work heightened that much more the Lisztian bravado of the virtuosic finale, which glowered as forcefully as some Faustian pact with the devil.
 
His encore choice of a Chopin nocturne was a misfit, stylistically too far afiend from MacDowell's Germanic thrust to be a compatible companion.
The newest sounds of the night stemmed from "blue cathedral" (sic), a 2002 opus by Jennifer Higdon of the Curtis Institute, an august institution only one year older than this orchestra. In her 11-minute "blue cathedral," Higdon imagines herself in a church that evolves into a heavenly scene. The arched dynamics of the piece are bathed in richest romanticism building up to dense washes, like the 1930s and 1940s scores of Korngold and Herrmann, ending in a finale I could visualize as a religious paean about sainthood---not the most original of media, to be sure, but very digestible, with attractive solo work for clarinet, oboe and viola. The dulcet bells at the conclusion were especially evocative.

These pieces were framed by Three Dance Episodes from Leonard Bernstein's Broadway show "On the Town"---deliciously jazzy!---and the Shostakovich Symphony No. 9 (1945) which, in offering frivolity rather than gravity, incensed the Soviet commissars who sought a paean glorifying the USSR's winning World War Two (virtually single-handed, in their view). Even the tone-deaf commissars could detect the composer's derisive musical protest. Three years later, Shostakovich was publicly rapped on the knuckles and forced to take refuge from premiering his major new works for several years.
 
Bolstered by generous private contributions years ago, the Santa Rosa community converted a former church into the comfortable Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, a viable 1,555-seat concert hall that's home to a half-dozen performing groups.
 
The orchestra is better than it sounds in this hall, where none of the strings emerge full-flower. Like most halls not built with symphonies foremost in the architects' minds, this one is acoustically marginal. That could change overnight with the construction of the new $39-million Green Center on the Sonoma State Univ. campus some 13 mi. south---probably close enough to San Fran to start drawing regular visits by the newspaper music critics there.
 
The scheduled departure of Kahane in 2006, after 11 years---longer in tenure than most had a right to expect from this conductor clearly on the upward path---should strike terror into no hearts, particularly if the new acoustical environment is more welcome than at the Burbank Center.

ŠPaul Hertelendy 2003