Symphony Review

SYMPHONY REVIEW

Portrait Of The Teenager
As A Post-Serial Composer

May 21, 2000

By Janos Gereben

Anthony Cheung, who gave up on conventional tonality when he was 13, received applause approaching ovation Sunday in Davies Hall at the premiere of his Portrait of the Artist as a Tormented Young Madman. He wrote the brief work for an orchestra of Mahlerian proportions two years ago, at age 16. By then he'd passed beyond the stage of "beyond tonality": he was writing good, exciting music, "new" and yet instantly accessible to the "family audience" in the hall today.

The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, conducted by Alasdair Neale, outdid its brilliant self in performing the work by one of its own. The densely structured, rhythmically challenging work came across without a hint of the blood, sweat, and tears that its preparation must have cost. (The first reading of Portrait was six months ago, in the Berkeley Symphony's "Under Construction" series, with George Thomson conducting and Kent Nagano hosting the event.)

Cheung, born in San Francisco on January 17, 1982 (the day of SFYO's inaugural concert), has been composing since age 7. He has completed two string quartets (influenced by Schoenberg), a piano quintet, Elegy for the Victims of Nanjing for solo viola, a large-scale cello concerto, incidental music for Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and, most recently, a sonata for violin and piano, a realization of Proust's fictitious Vinteuil sonata as described in Swann's Way. Cheung is now graduating from San Francisco University High School and planning to attend Harvard in the fall.

Portrait opens with a trumpet call (again reminding me of Mahler), followed by the violas' lyrical response. The first violin (Yixing Xu) and principal flute (Irina Alexeev, shining brightly through the concert) are among the instruments introducing new themes, until a ferocious (and Straussian) tutti builds to what the composer correctly describes as a "large mass of sound" (leading perfectly to the concert's last piece, Stravinsky's Firebird).

However young the composer is, Portrait is a superbly mature piece -- it has its say and then stops, instead of "filling."

The Youth Orchestra once again demonstrated its uncanny ability to play rhythmically difficult, exposed, large-scale works -- from Bizet's L'Arlesienne suite today to Stravinsky -- on a sustained level of intensity that is rare among orchestras, regardless of age. With the 95-degree temperature outside and the teenage performers in their dark suits on the stage, here was preparation for life in the arts.

The concert's only disappointment came with Sarah Chang's appearance in the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1 -- the whole work performed under par, in fact. Chang is fast becoming a mystery: after getting bad reviews here on Wednesday, I heard her superb performance of the Prokofiev Concerto No. 1 on Friday in Davies, and now a rough and rocky Bruch, too measured, not nearly romantic and committed enough, with occasional slurred and missed notes . . . the same artist! She must have known that things were going badly because in the middle of the first movement, while not having music of her own to play, she suddenly joined the first violin section, playing their part, almost as if to build up to the next solo passage. When that came, she was her "old self" for a minute. But then she settled for playing through, adequate but not very interesting, and a far cry from her many outstanding performances around here.

But then here's a dumb-sounding but necessary reminder: both Chang and Cheung are 18, with a whole life and career still ahead of them. True, to a violin virtuoso of 9 and a composer of 7, their current selves must be ancient.

(Janos Gereben is arts editor of Oakland's Post Newspaper Group, and senior editor of www.the451.com.)