Wagner, Liszt, and Brahms in Escondido

The best concert I’ve been to in a while happened on Friday, November 18 at The California Center for the Arts Escondido. Rafael Payare proved, yet again, that the San Diego Symphony is a force to be reckoned with—at least when he’s on the podium.

The concert began with the “Prelude and Liebestod” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Wagner himself approved this concert version. The performance was all anyone could hope for. When a legendary piece of music receives a competent performance it can be magical. When the performance itself borders on legendary then the goosebumps begin to appear. Such was the case on this evening.

Unfortunately, the performance was marred by the most aggressive speaker feedback I’ve ever heard. One might even say that it was Wagnerian in nature. The body language of the orchestra confirmed their disappointment. They knew they were making a spectacular statement as an ensemble and an unforced technical error interrupted that for the San Diego Symphony. Why the speakers were on is beyond my comprehension. I understand the microphones being on for a recording but the house speakers are not needed for recording.

The performance carried on and suffered little from the circumstances. The conclusion carried the full force of Wagner’s five-hour exploration of day and night distilled into about 20 minutes. Credit must be given to the musicians for delivering this masterpiece in the face of adversity.

Wagner’s great friend, Franz Liszt, was up next with his Piano Concerto No. 2. There is a chasm between Liszt and Wagner when it comes to writing orchestral music but the piano part was another matter. The raw athleticism associated with Liszt was absent in the opening section being replaced by a lyricism that pianist Marc-André Hamelin expressed admirably. When it came time to flex the pianistic muscles, Hamelin was also up to the task.

The final piece of music was Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. Brahms had previously made several attempts at writing a symphony, one of which became his Piano Concerto No. 1. What held Brahms back was the sound of Beethoven’s giant footsteps. He once claimed, “I shall never write a symphony! You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you!”

The symphony literally starts with the ominous footsteps being pounded out of the timpani. After the Liszt piano concerto, the imposing structure of Brahms’s symphonic writing was all the more obvious. The feeling was like standing at the base of the Empire State Building for the first time. Payare and his San Diegans were up to the task of scaling Brahms’s symphonic argument that opposed the overt emotionalism of Wagner’s Tristan. I found it to be a masterful stroke of programming.

Maestro Payare gave the orchestra everything he had and they reciprocated. There were a few dodgy moments in the brass but they were there to deliver the victory when it mattered most in the closing bars. It looked as if Payare was going to begin levitating on the stand as he rampaged to the conclusion leaving the audience overwhelmed by a concert that delivered the goods from start to finish.