Arts & Events

With Australian conductor Simone Young making her local debut, San Francisco Symphony presented concerts April 18-20 featuring works by Maurice Ravel and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. I attended the Friday evening performance at Davies Symphony Hall, where we heard Ravel’s lovely Pavane pour une infante défunte and his Piano Concerto in G Major with Louis Lortie as soloist, plus Rimsky-Korsakov’s dynamic Scheherazade. This program offered us ample opportunity to appraise Simone Young’s conducting style.  

Let’s begin by saying there was much arm-waving by Simone Young in the program’s opening work, Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte. Conducting without a baton in this work, Simone Young wind-milled her arms all over the place in a work so subtly orchestrated that it hardly seems to call for such histrionics. Was she over-conducting it? The interpretation was sound. It was just that the conductor’s arm-waving seemed, well, excessive. How else can I say it? 

For the Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major. Simone Young led with a baton, at least in the first and third movements, which feature jazz-inspired riffs, trombone smears, and dramatic percussion thumps. In these outer movements, the piano offers jagged interventions, robustly performed by pianist Louis Lortie. In the second movement, a lovely Adagio, Simone Young hardly needed to conduct at all, much less with a baton. In this slow movement, much of the time there is only the piano spinning out an elongated melody with walking chords. This movement reminds me of the music of Ravel’s contemporary, Eric Satie. There is here the same seeming simplicity as in Satie, yet here there is also Ravel’s artful workmanship, with flute and woodwinds offering embroideries on the basic melody, followed by a lovely English horn solo.  

The third and final movement is a lively Presto, which brings back passages from the opening movement, here transformed by the piano. Trombone smears abound, and a bassoon offers a demanding solo. As a showcase for piano, this finale was admirably performed by Montreal-born Louis Lortie.  

In the concert’s second half, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was featured. It was this work, utterly familiar yet always fresh, that gave us perhaps the best opportunity to assess the conducting style of Simone Young. The same tendency to over-conduct as was seen in Ravel’s Pavane was apparent here. Yet somehow Ms. Young brought it all together in this reading of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The opening was, as necessary, both foreboding and dramatic. The first music we hear evokes the brutality of the Sultan, while the second music heard is that of Scheherazade herself, and it is a much sweeter, more beguiling music that introduces us to the wily woman’s ability to spin out story after story that keeps the Sultan, and us, eagerly panting for more. In playing Scheherazade’s theme, Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik offered his usual superb musicianship even if his tone was sometimes a bit thin. 

In this piece there are many wonderful opportunities for brief instrumental solos. A bassoon solo in the second movement was beautifully played by Stephen Paulson, and the theme was admirably taken up by oboist Eugene Izotow. Then the clarinet, ably played by Carey Bell, performed a recitative over unmeasured strumming of plucked strings. There followed brass fanfares that announce drama at every turn. The third movement offers a more tender mood, with much lyricism. The finale returns us to the work’s opening contrast of Sultan’s dramatic, darker music and the softer, more melodic music of Scheherazade. Simone Young emphasized this contrast quite emphatically. When the trombones take up the Sultan’s theme, a certain high pitch of drama ensues. But it is Scheherazade who has the last word, offering her familiar theme in the low register, as played here by Alexander Barantschik, then swirling it ever and ever higher, until it almost disappears in a final moment of absolute peace and tranquility, the first such moment the much-stressed Scheherazade has known since she began her seemingly endless set of tales within-a-tale from The Arabian Nights. All told, Simone Young’s interpretive instincts seem quite sound, even if her arms, and not just her arms, for she often leaps about on the podium, tend to be a bit too busy.