Hvorostovsky
proves powerful with chilling 'Don't Grieve'
By Georgia Rowe
The San Francisco Times
18 May 2002
Call it a case of art anticipating life: Giya Kancheli's "Don't Grieve" was composed before the events of Sept. 11. But this mournfully moving score easily sounds as if it could have been written in the wake of last year's tragedies.
Under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, Kancheli's elegiac work for baritone and orchestra received a splendid world premiere by the San Francisco Symphony this week. With Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the vocal soloist, the Georgian composer's writing came across with gripping force.
Thursday's performance revealed a strangely orchestrated yet timbrally attractive score, which unfolds in a single movement over the span of 28 minutes and incorporates texts from a wide variety of sources. Kancheli sets poetry the way surrealist painters make collages, often assembling lines and phrases by several poets in a single verse; Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, Auden, Rilke, Pasternak and Tabidze (in the original English, German and Russian) are among the featured contributors, with a few original lines by the composer acting as connective tissue.
The orchestration alternates between delicate writing for piano, woodwinds and diaphanous strings, and tutti sections of almost frighteningly apocalyptic scope. The overall effect is fragmented, and some of the writing is undeniably sentimental. Yet the work acquires a vertiginous power as it proceeds, and Tilson Thomas brought the contrasts into dynamic relief.
For his part, Hvorostovsky invested the work with haunting authority. The Siberian baritone has often been criticized for his humorless demeanor, but his grim approach seemed appropriate here, and his weighty tone, articulate phrasing and dramatic delivery could scarcely be faulted.
Throughout "Don't Grieve," which was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony and completed by Kancheli on Sept. 5, there's a sense of uncertainty and spiritual seeking that lends the work a universal quality. "What's to come is still unsure," the baritone sings (in a bit of text from Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"); now, more than ever, those words ring true.
Thursday's concert also included a ravishing performance of Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe." Tilson Thomas led the complete, nearly hour-long ballet score (composed between 1909 and 1912 for the Ballet Russes), which was last played in its entirety by the symphony in 1994 under the direction of Andre Previn.
In Tilson Thomas' hands, it sounded like a revelation. This is Ravel's greatest work, and the familiar melodies, the enchanted atmosphere, the orchestral colors and textures were all in place. But what was most impressive was Tilson Thomas' command of its rhythmic vitality. There was much to dazzle the listener, from the graceful music of the opening scene to the swirling revelry of the final dance. The chorus is often excised from performances of the work, and it was a pleasure to hear Vance George's Symphony Chorus singing its wordless part with such radiance.
The evening began with the Prelude to Mussorgsky's opera "Khovanshchina," in an orchestration completed after the composer's death by Rimsky-Korsakov. This brief but lovely tone poem was an elegant curtain-raiser, and it offered a tantalizing taste of the delights to come in the symphony's Russian Festival next month.
(c) SF Times, 2002