Review | French and Jazz Manners and Matters

What’s in a title? The Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS) can be forgiven for latching onto the ultra-familiar title French Connections for its most recent program, a delectable and inspirational affair that landed at The Granada Theatre last week. The famed late director William Friedkin and star Gene Hackman would never have guessed how useful and reusable the title of their 1971 film would become, for headline writers, marketing hook designers and anyone in search of a pithy phrase regarding things variously French.

Give us a better catch-all phrase to describe the program designed and led by dynamic and calmly commanding guest conductor/pianist David Greilsammer. His inventive package seamlessly spanned French composers of note from Baroque to 20th-century sources, from early music master Rameau (the luminous Orchestral Suite from Platee) to proto-Modernists Darius Milhaud and Maurice Ravel. From the “connection” gray area came token German composer Haydn, in the form of his ideal, light-hearted, Symphony No. 85 “La Reine” (“The Queen”), part of his set of Paris symphonies, and a favorite of Marie “let them eat cake” Antoinette.

As it happens, this SBS program — given only one Sunday performance versus the Symphony’s traditional Saturday night/Sunday afternoon run — also contained clear and certain “jazz connections,” as well. Milhaud’s eccentric delight Le Bœuf sur le toit (“The Ox on the Roof”)” stirs elements of jazz as well as Latin American and cabaret-esque flavors into its musical stew. Ravel’s grand Piano Concerto in G includes generous helpings of jazz influence, written as it was after the composer visited New York and blithely soaked in the jazz he heard across the pond.

Wisely, Greilsammer opted to switch halves of the concert program as originally planned, making Milhaud’s giddy romp the first half closer, and Greilsammer’s powerful rendering as soloist in the Ravel became the concert’s rousing climax. Under Greilsammer’s firm yet flexible guidance, the Symphony handily rose to the occasion — or the occasions — of this varietal program.

Milhaud’s 1920 piece, which preceded his more densely jazz-steeped La Création du monde — blending orchestral classical and jazz before Gershwin’s milestone pieces — had been intended by the composer as accompaniment for a Charlie Chaplin film. The kinetic qualities and mercurial moods of the score do have a Chaplin-esque aura, but it also suits the ultimate fate of the music, for a ballet by surrealist-in-training Jean Cocteau.

In Milhaud’s fiendishly playful piece, a chirpy earworm of a principle theme repeatedly grabs the spotlight but is interrupted by darker spirits. Yet the theme stubbornly resurfaces, in whack-a-mole fashion. Days later, the theme continues to haunt my musical memory banks.

Equally memory-seizing was the potent reading of Ravel’s captivating Concerto in G, one of those 20th-century orchestral masterpieces that manages to walk the line between modernist daring and a seductively accessible character. Greilsammer, conducting from the piano (and with Trinity Episcopal organist Thomas Joyce as page-turner), demonstrated his dazzling yet nuanced skills at the piano, in the vibrant outer movements and the infamously lyrical adagio. The legato lingering seven-note motive embedded in the middle of that slow movement is one of western music’s precious and crystallized moments, well-earned and, here, well-played.

Then came the energized pact of post-impressionist and jazz-lined moves for piano and orchestra, climaxing in a duly raucous finale. Ovations were in order.

Depending on the beholder’s tastes and perspective, the Symphony’s French Connections afternoon will go down as one of this SBS season’s highlights — possibly the highlight, although it’s too early to say. Deep connections were made, French and otherwise.