Stravinsky Fest Has ‘Rite’ Opening

The point of the century, it becomes clear as we end it, is no point. No single voice stands for any endeavor, any field of thought, any art. There are simply too many of us. Still Igor Stravinsky does cast, it has also become clear by now, the longest shadow on 20th century classical music.

So Michael Tilson Thomas has made the obvious choice, this century-ending year, for the annual June festival he has hosted in his four seasons as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. But he also has personal reasons. Stravinsky loomed large over Tilson Thomas’ youth in Los Angeles. As a teenager, he performed Stravinsky’s music in the presence of the composer at the Monday Evening Concerts.

The festival is planned as a logical overview of Stravinsky’s varied career. Friday night in Davies Symphony Hall was devoted to the Russian Stravinsky; to follow over the next two weeks will be programs examining the Neoclassical years between the wars in Paris, the sacred music and the American years.

Yet the logic we also take for granted as being at the center of Stravinsky’s music was precisely what was challenged at the remarkable look Friday at the Russian Stravinsky and what helped make it so astonishing.

We cherish Stravinsky for his craftsmanship, his elegance (even when the music is brutal) and its refreshing energy. He refined everything he heard--whether the Russian folk music of his St. Petersburg youth at the end of the 19th century, the early music he refashioned in his Neoclassical period, or his turn to the 12-tone method late in life. All of it--even a wonderful, obscure arrangement for brass and winds of “The Song of the Volga Boatman,” Tilson Thomas’ surprise encore Friday--is rhythmically striking, abstractly beautiful, pure, without wasted notes.

Yet Tilson Thomas seemed to be saying something more, and maybe more important. Stravinsky was not as dishwasher-clean a Modernist as he pronounced himself. The Russian Stravinsky evening included “Reynard,” a burlesque adapted from Russian folk tales; “The Wedding” (“Les Noces”), a depiction of a Russian nuptial; “King of the Stars” (“Zvezdoliki”), a short choral piece to a text by the Russian symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont; and “The Rite of Spring” (“Le Sacre du Printemps”), the primitivist ballet with its pictures of pagan Russia. And what was first striking about hearing these selections--written in Paris between 1911 and 1917, through the first great upheaval of the century--was the sheer chaos of the music and their Babel of languages, verbal and musical.

For instance, Michael Steinberg, in his worldly and compulsively readable program notes, compares “The Wedding” (as Stravinsky did himself) to Joyce’s “Ulysses.” A mixed vocal quartet, accompanied by a riot of banging from four pianos and percussion, couples and crowds, feasting and love-making, are all a mad jumble. “Reynard,” for two tenors and two basses accompanied by a small ensemble, is also slightly hysterical, animal voices here in surreal fable. “King of the Stars” was a small experiment for large choral forces in Scriabinesque opacity clarified through French Impressionist spectacles. And “The Rite,” of course, is the famous vision of a barbarous modern century, and the work meant to end the lingering Wagnerian dominance of the 19th century on music. (It is a matter of amusement, controversy and even anger here that the profoundly anti-Wagnerian Stravinsky is competing with, or antidote to, San Francisco Opera’s “Ring” cycle in the theater next door).

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Tilson Thomas’ performances of “The Wedding” (sung in Russian) and “Reynard” (in English translation) were illuminating, theatrical, precise and rhythmically astute. The singers and pianists were very good, and soprano Susan Narucki in “The Wedding” was outstanding. “King of the Stars” was sung with alluring sensuality by the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.

“The Rite,” however, was in a class of its own--a bombshell that put everything in perspective. The composer often spoke of his suspicion of overly emotional music-making and even went so far as to disguise the folk sources of his melodies. Tilson Thomas, however, has new confidence in his very different Russian roots (through Yiddish Russian theater), to say nothing of his quintessentially West Coast American ones.

The performance allowed the individual players an unprecedented amount of expressive freedom. The opening bassoon solo was as inflected as Gershwin’s clarinet in “Rhapsody in Blue.” This ballet, too, became a sort of “Ulysses,” full of voices speaking all at once, yet held together through some kind of electrifying magnetism. Tilson Thomas has made an arresting new recording of “The Rite.” But this was more--a “Rite” for the end of our noisy, fractious and thrilling century.

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* The Stravinsky Festival continues through June 25, Davies Symphony Hall, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. $12-$73. (415) 864-6000; https://www.sfsymphony.org.