As this year draws to a close, musicians and audiences have one last chance to celebrate the 200th birthday of Franz Liszt (1811-1886). The program this afternoon featured a couple of less-familiar orchestral pieces as well as the First and Second Piano Concerti. (Liszt’s orchestral works are infrequently performed, these ones especially so.) His Orpheus and two Légendes are tone poems, a genre pioneered by Liszt himself. They are more proto-impressionistic than the tone poems of say Richard Strauss; rather than a programmatic musical depiction of events and actions, Liszt aimed in these pieces to create atmospheres influenced by the mythological or religious figures of their titles.
Liszt’s orchestral works certainly deserve to be heard more often, even if some elements of his style can sound stilted when scored for orchestra. For example, it requires a great deal of musical inertia to vary the tempo or inflect an orchestra’s playing with any rubato. This metrical solidity makes it difficult to render Liszt’s less-inspired passagework, full of long formulaic sequences, with the requisite impulsiveness to avoid sounding predictable. On the other hand, a single instrumentalist (a solo pianist, for instance) can take more liberties and “help” the work along in its compositionally weaker moments. As it happens, the more famous version of the two Légendes is for solo piano, published in 1866 – three years after the composition of the orchestral version, which was published only in 1984 (it is unclear which was written first).
Despite any compositional inconsistencies, Liszt was certainly done justice in this concert. The San Diego Symphony is one of a handful of American ensembles to have seen its artistic level improve dramatically in recent years, and with it, financial stability. (Critic Alex Ross touches on the same phenomenon in opera companies in a recent New Yorker magazine piece.) In eight years under the direction of Indonesian-born Maestro Jahja Ling, the orchestra has hired 44 new players, including twelve in principal positions. The assumption that young talent directly translates into higher quality usually smacks of ageism – as it happens, the more recent hires range widely in age – but in this case the improvement has been profound, as the ensemble recently earned a “Tier One” designation by the League of American Orchestras.
Maestro Ling seemed to prefer to ration true climaxes, and while vivid colors weren’t always there to fill in lulls in excitement, there is something admirable in the desire to let these works speak for themselves. Mr. Ling pulled out of his string players a beautiful, cohesive sound – solos by principal cellist Yao Zhao were especially elegant – and the winds and brass played quite well. The only question marks were in the percussion. Dubbed the “triangle concerto”, the E-flat Concerto received a lackluster solo on that instrument, and the excitement of the A major Concerto’s Allegro marziale and finale was undermined by truly awful cymbal playing.