2012-04-29

Printable version: S.F. Symphony review: Stphane Denve conducts

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S.F. Symphony review: Stphane Denve conducts

Joshua Kosman Saturday, April 21, 2012

When the French conductor Stphane Denve made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony two years ago, he proved most effective in French music. So for his return to Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday afternoon, someone must have decided simply to go all in. The result was a nearly all-French extravaganza that elicited muscular and brilliantly shaped performances from both conductor and orchestra, a wondrous display that began with works by Berlioz, Saint-Sans and Roussel. And although Stravinsky's 1919 "Firebird" Suite is steeped in the music of Russia, the ballet was premiered in Paris, so what the heck - just for today, we'll count it as honorarily French. The temptation is strong because Denve takes a similar approach to all of this music, conjuring up rich and big-boned orchestral textures that maintain the transparency so prized by French composers. His conducting is fluid and strong, and most of his attention seems to go toward handling the larger elements of a score - organizing the major structural points of form, balancing the ensemble and channeling the rhythmic sweep of a performance. Y et in all of this, none of the specifics falls by the wayside. That much was evident in the opening selection, a spacious and wonderfully dynamic account of Berlioz's "Roman Carnival" Overture marked by broad paragraphs and pointed rhythms. Russ deLuna shone in the opening English horn solo. After intermission, the Symphonic Fragments from Roussel's ballet "The Spider's Feast" proved equally arresting, with plenty of narrative detail and an evocative solo from principal flutist Tim Day. And the Stravinsky sounded at once reflective and theatrically vivid, from the ominous murmurings of the opening through the explosive "Infernal Dance" to the sunny conclusion, its dynamic shadings impeccably controlled. Pianist Jean-Y ves Thibaudet was on hand to expend his extraordinary keyboard skills on Saint-Sans' Piano Concerto No. 5, the last and perhaps most vacuous of the composer's vacuous piano concertos. The concerto bears the subtitle "Egyptian," either because a tune in the slow movement is drawn from Saint-Sans' travels by the Nile or because the score's garish bad taste and cheesy effects prefigure those of Cecil B. DeMille's film epic, "The Ten Commandments." Aside from the admittedly winsome "Nubian love song" of the central Andante, the piece is mostly an assemblage of arpeggios and scales, which Thibaudet dispatched with depressing precision. The real music came in his encore, a gorgeous and haunting rendition of Frederic Mompou's "Jeunes filles au jardin." San Francisco Symphony: 8 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave.,
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2012-04-29

Printable version: S.F. Symphony review: Stphane Denve conducts

S.F. $15-$140. (415) 864-6000. www.sfsymphony.org. Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle's music critic. jkosman@sfchronicle.com
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/21/DDSN1O6PDV.DTL This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco C hronicle
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