It looked, on paper, like an adventurous program: all American composers, all twentieth-century work, and (with the exception of George Gershwin) not names that are often viewed as audience-friendly. Indeed, Michael Tilson Thomas brought his microphone out and spoke to the audience before the first piece—generally a sign that something difficult to absorb is about to take place. Yet the Charles Ives work that he introduced, the “Alcotts” section of A Concord Symphony, turned out to be an uncharacteristically smooth and indeed almost anodyne pieces of Ivesiana (a fitting tribute, skeptics might think, to the family that produced the horribly saintly Marmee and Beth). Its six minutes of hymnlike melody went down like a cool draft of water.
And in a way this was the problem with the whole evening. It was pleasant to hear Gershwin’s An American in Paris (though I must admit I found myself missing Gene Kelly), and it was enormously amusing to listen to George Antheil’s twelve-minute Jazz Symphony. The latter was both witty and exciting enough to raise some startled laughs, and the virtuosically jazzy trumpet solo by the brilliant Mark Inouye was a definite thrill. But even Antheil’s antics were not difficult or even challenging, just fun.
The only part of the program that soared above this easy-listening level was the Barber Violin Concerto, which had James Ehnes in the solo role. I would go to just about any concert that featured James Ehnes. He is an amazingly skillful player, capable of hitting every note truly and accurately even in impossibly fast passages. But skill is perhaps the least of his virtues. He plays with intense, suppressed feeling—unpretentiously, undemonstratively, undistractingly—as if the pulse of the music were flowing through his veins and down to his fingers and thence directly into our ears. He is, in this respect, a pure vehicle of the composer’s intentions, not a star on the stage; and yet in his own modest way he makes audiences love him.
Because of the felicities of his style, I could see how the first movement of the Barber was sweepingly melodic, the second filled with slow, deep feeling, and the third rich with an infinitely complicated grace. The third movement is notoriously difficult to play (the violin part seems to include about a thousand notes per minute, all in different rhythms) and it lends itself to being done as a discrete, show-offy party trick, but Ehnes made it seem of a piece with the rest: built up to, grounded in its predecessors, and not just a confection on the top. Unlike the other works performed on this program, the Barber asked us some questions; it didn’t just let us enjoy. That one could nonetheless enjoy it without bothering to answer the questions (questions like “How do these three movements fit together?” “What is the relation between virtuosity and feeling?” “To what extent is the violin an extension of the composer as well as of the player?” and so on) was proven by the vast and resounding enthusiasm with which the entire audience greeted Ehnes’s performance.
It was a slightly odd audience for the San Francisco Symphony, in a good way—there were many more young people than usual, and many more people who obviously were not regular attenders of classical concerts. Lower-than-normal ticket prices may have explained some of this, but clearly there was some kind of effortful outreach going on as well. Does that commendable desire to include new audiences necessarily have to go hand-in-hand with an evening of easy listening? I hope not. I suspect not. And if I were asked to prove my suspicion, I would point to the Barber as Exhibit A.