San Francisco Chimes In on Carl St.Clair

While Michael Palmer was guest-conducting the Pacific Symphony last week in Costa Mesa, its music director, Carl St.Clair, was leading the San Francisco Symphony in music by Brahms, Haydn and Mendelssohn.

Reviewers for that city’s two major newspapers bemoaned the traditional repertory, as if that were St.Clair’s choice. (Of course, the music director--in this case Michael Tilson Thomas--oversees programming, not a visiting conductor.) And they found little to admire in the performances.

“Familiar repertory was played reasonably well, and then everybody went home,” wrote Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“St.Clair favors judicious tempos (perhaps a little on the slow side), straightforward phrasing and rich, well-mixed sonorities. For a composer [Kosman means conductor] with an interest in new music, [St.Clair’s] beat is not precise. [The] performance often sacrificed rhythmic clarity in an attempt at expressive depth.”

Kosman’s remarks about the Brahms’ Double Concerto pertained to only the soloists. He described the performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 49 (“La Passione”) as “a dark-hued, rather lax account. The symphony’s two slow movements in particular combined sonic allure with a troubling lack of momentum.”

The slow movement of Mendelssohn’s “Italian,” wrote Kosman, “made the strongest impression, with the cello section keeping up the firm unyielding march that undergirds the main melody. The rapid, breathless finale foundered at first on St.Clair’s uncertain beat but raced along delightfully once the orchestra found its stride.”

Timothy Pfaff wrote in the San Francisco Examiner: “This week’s Symphony debut by conductor Carl St.Clair has the ultimately ingratiating feel of a youngster taking a high-performance sports car, not his, out for an invigorating spin.”

St.Clair, wrote Pfaff, settled “for good-natured, comfort-loving trips through familiar terrain.”

In Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, Pfaff liked the conductor’s “delineating the symphony’s familiar themes with crisp purposeful articulation” and further supplying “some savvy instrumental balances that enhanced the music’s natural and still-resplendent colors.”

“Lest that sound like a meager achievement, it marked a significant improvement over the indistinct, generic symphony-orchestra sonorities that largely prevailed up to that point.”

Pfaff misidentified St.Clair as a “Long Beach conductor” but described him as “demonstrably over-parted” in the Brahms Double Concerto, though he also regarded the two soloists (violinist Chee-Yun and cellist Michael Grebanier) as “oddly matched.” (Pfaff also misidentified the violinist.)

“A concerto that needs a healthy dollop of soul to reveal its treasures found most of them obscured in an undifferentiated wash of sound that seldom departed the dynamic compass of mezzo-forte to forte. Without a song, this concerto is virtually mute. Without a duet, it’s almost pointless.”

Pfaff called the performance of the Haydn symphony “clean” but added that “one would hardly have guessed that it marked the culmination of the composer’s Sturm und Drang phase. . . . The performance smacked of FM-commute Haydn, before radio stations got smart. ‘La Passione,’ next exit.”